


we'll make this feel like home

by capriciouslouis



Series: the roommates 'verse [1]
Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-28
Updated: 2016-09-28
Packaged: 2018-08-18 05:52:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 45,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8151296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/capriciouslouis/pseuds/capriciouslouis
Summary: Straight guy worries he's being homophobic to gay roommate, realizes he's fallen in love with him.

  Plot twist: it turns out I don't have any problem with Barry kissing guys if it's me he's kissing.
Len decides to renounce his life of crime and start a normal life, and ends up becoming roommates with Barry Allen, forensic scientist and total nuisance. For Leonard, Barry is just a mild annoyance who pays half of the rent - until he starts bringing his boyfriends home, and that's when things get complicated.
Loosely based on this article that was floating around tumblr a while back.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Not so much canon-divergent as 'what the hell is canon, I'm just going to ignore everything to suit my own purposes but not enough to make this an actual au'.
> 
> The beginning of this fic takes place about a year before the particle accelerator explosion. Here's a quick run-through of what exactly I've changed around to make everything fit.
> 
> 1\. Barry has not yet become The Flash. Obviously. Likewise, Len is just your run-of the mill felon, and not Captain Cold.  
> 2\. Len and Sara are already friends because why the hell not. They were my brotp in Legends of Tomorrow. Fight me.  
> 3\. Everything that happened in Arrow happened a year or so earlier because that's the only way to make it fit, EXCEPT for them meeting Barry. I'm actually only halfway through season 2 of Arrow so WHO KNOWS how much of a mess this fic is if you follow that timeline as well.  
> 4\. Barry, Cisco and Caitlin are already friends, I'll let you decide how that happened because I have no idea lmao  
> 5\. This is kind of the theme song for this fic.
> 
> This is my first time writing for this fandom so apologies for any established fanon that I mess up!

During the course of his life, Leonard Snart had made a lot of mistakes.

Losing his virginity in a dirty gas station bathroom when he was seventeen: that was a mistake. Dropping out of high school a few short weeks before graduation: that was a mistake.

Agreeing to flat-share with some kid he met on Craigslist: big fucking mistake.

The kid in question, who had introduced himself as Barry Allen, was bumbling around the flat making a whole lot of noise and swearing softly as he tripped over cardboard boxes, most of which were his own. So far, Len knew little of his new roommate, apart from that he was a forensic scientist, and that he was also an idiot.

He was certainly a good-natured idiot; he’d bounded out of the moving van with a grin of quite astonishing proportions stretching right across his face, shook Len’s hand and began bouncing about like a mildly excitable puppy, babbling incessantly all the while. Not being one for small talk, Len made little in the way of a response, but this did not seem to put Barry off. The occasional grunt seemed to be quite enough for him. It was endearing, really. If Len had been listening, he might have learned far more about Barry Allen than he had. As it was, he had picked up mere snippets. He knew what Barry’s job was, partially due to the ridiculous amount of forensic equipment that Barry apparently kept in his bedroom rather than at the office. He knew that he had previously lived with two people named Joe and Iris, that his friends were Cisco and Caitlin (this because they had all insisted on calling or skyping him in order to ascertain that his new room mate was not a murderer. Len though he might soon _become_ a murderer if Barry’s phone did not stop buzzing like a bumble bee on steroids.) Other than that, he did not know much about the kid, and did not wish to. Barry was paying half of the rent, and that was enough for him.

It was not enough for Barry.

“So what do you do?” Barry asked cheerfully, sitting on the kitchen worktop and swinging his legs. His dingy sneakers dangled in mid-air and Len was watching carefully to make sure he didn’t leave dirty marks on the surfaces that a landlord could use as an excuse to put their prices up.

“This and that,” Len said, in a tone that suggested he was not in the mood for more questions.

In truth, at the moment, Len did not do very much - hence the need for a roommate who could contribute to the bills. Not long ago he had been what some people might refer to as a petty criminal - robbing ATMs, some minor art theft, clearly nothing too impressive since he was currently living in a small flat in Central City as opposed to a multi-million dollar mansion, or, alternatively, a prison cell. However, he’d grown a little tired of constantly looking over his shoulder for cops and he was looking to add something other than ‘felon’ to his resume.

Unfortunately, having little previous experience in doing anything other than stealing did not give him much opportunity for career advancement, or any career at all aside from more of the same. Currently he was living off the ill-gotten gains of the last few jobs he’d done, carefully making it last while he looked for something legal. He did not, however, think that Barry needed to know that.

“Cool,” said Barry chirpily, either acknowledging the brush-off and moving past it, or missing it entirely. Len suspected the latter. Still, he had to be grateful that the kid didn’t start asking pointed questions about how Len was going to afford his share of the rent. He had that much decorum, at least. Or maybe he was just that naive. “I’m in forensics. I guess I already said that.” At least ten times. “I just wanted to thank you for agreeing to move in with me so fast, you know? I mean, Joe and Iris are cool, but I can’t live with my dad forever - well, not my dad, more like a foster dad, I mean he’s not even really a foster dad, but - ”

Dear God, would the babble never end? For the sake of maintaining some illusion of politeness Len had been half paying attention as he leaned on the worktop with his arms folded, but the more Barry talked the more astonishing it became that his brain could keep up with the speed his mouth was going at. Perhaps it couldn’t; he was starting to stumble over himself like Bambi on a frozen lake, stuttering and repeating himself and doubling back to correct something he’d said five sentences previously. Len couldn’t keep up and didn’t particularly wish to. Barry was a sweet kid, but if he didn’t shut up then Len might just have to shoot him. He was treating this like a sleepover with his brand new best buddy and Leonard had no intention of playing along with it. This was purely a business transaction, and Barry was more than ten years his junior even if he hadn’t been mildly irritating. Already, Len was seriously regretting ever posting that advert on Craigslist.

“I’m going to go unpack,” he said, interrupting Barry midway through some babbly monologue about his friends Frisco and Caelan, or whatever the hell their names were.

“Oh,” said Barry, evidently taken aback. Len could practically see the cogs turning in his brain as he tried to figure out a response. “I’ll help!” he said.

“I think you have your own unpacking to worry about,” Len said curtly, nodding at the detritus on the floor. It could not be argued that most of it belonged to Barry.

“Oh, right. Sure. Well, I’ll catch you later - we should probably get to know each other if we’ll be living together - I can order a pizza, or maybe we could go out for a drink or something later - ”

Already retreating to his room, carrying the only box that he’d not already moved into his own space, Len wondered if the kid was capable of taking a hint. The evidence would suggest not. He also wondered if Barry could even get served - not that it made any difference. The only reason he would go out for a drink with Barry Allen would be so that he had the opportunity to drown him in it.

Barry was still following him. Len put the box down on his bed, turned around and shut the door in Barry’s face.

The kid, who up until that point had still been yapping desperately, fell silent. It was bizarre, the sudden lack of noise in the apartment, and Len felt a stab of sudden guilt that was immediately quashed by annoyance. It wasn’t his fault that the kid didn’t understand how to shut the hell up.

He could see the shadow cast by Barry’s sneakers underneath the crack beneath the bedroom door. It lingered there for a few moments, as if waiting for Len to relent and open the door again. An unwanted mental picture popped into his head, of Barry hanging his head dejectedly in the corridor like the proverbial puppy that had been left out in the rain. Irritated with himself, Len shook his head to dispel it. He didn’t do bleeding hearts. The kid needed to toughen up.

After a few more moments, the shadow vanished and Len could distantly hear the squeak of Barry’s sneakers as he walked away, heading back towards the kitchen. A minute or so later, the tinny sound of iphone speakers started up a few rooms down as Barry put on some music to drown his sorrows. Len rolled his eyes. Lady Gaga. Honestly.

Things were quiet for a while after that, only the muted sounds of various pop songs leaking through the apartment and they weren’t loud enough to get on Len’s nerves. He was beginning to be concerned about his new roommates appalling taste in music, but that was Barry’s business.

Unpacking didn’t take long; Len didn’t have much. He made his bed (the apartment came furnished and his bed was hardly the largest or the comfiest bed he’d ever had, _and_ it was a single, but he’d take what he could get) and hung a few of his art prints (not the stolen ones, that seemed like asking for trouble). After hanging his clothes in the wardrobe, putting a few of his battered paperbacks on the bookshelf and taking a few photos of the room to show the landlord at the end of the lease (he didn’t trust landlords; he’d heard horror stories about them accusing new tenants of causing damage that had been there for years and demanding money for it) he had to sit down and think, because there wasn’t much else to do.

Their internet hadn’t been connected yet, and Len didn’t own any DVDs. He didn’t watch much TV, period. He had a deck of cards in one of his drawers, and a bottle of bourbon in the wardrobe, but he didn’t feel much like playing cards with Barry. That seemed likely to end in disaster. For a moment he considered taking one of his books straight off the shelf again and cracking it open, but he’d read them all a hundred times before and wasn’t much in the mood for reading.

With a reluctant sigh, he went to see what Barry was doing.

The kid was unpacking dejectedly. God, it was pitiful. He was putting forks into a cutlery drawer one by one, and even the clinking of the metal sounded melancholic. The music was still playing, some upbeat chart hit from a few months back, but somehow that made him look even more pathetic. Len cleared his throat.

Barry looked up dolefully. “Hey. What’s up?”

To his horror, Len realised he was about to apologise. He struggled valiantly to stop himself, but it burst out of him without his permission. “I’m sorry if I was a little cold to you earlier. Social skills aren’t my forte.”

Christ, the kid lit up like a sun lamp. “That’s okay! I guess I talk too much. Iris always said - ” he cut himself off, embarrassed. “Sorry. I’m doing it again, aren’t I?”

“Yep,” Len said, but he managed to crack a smile. Hopefully it wasn’t too encouraging. “It’s fine, kid, just try not to talk my ear off next time.”

“I’m twenty-five!”

“Whatever you say, kid.” Len turned to leave.

“Are you leaving?”

“I have to pick up some groceries.”

“Oh.” For a moment Len could see Barry grappling with the urge to offer to accompany him, but with a tremendous effort, he swallowed it down. “Uh, okay. I’ll see you later, then.”

“Sure,” Len said, and left.

It was uncanny, the ability that kid had to make him feel like a terrible bastard in just a few short syllables. He had never anticipated that Barry would be so keen to be bosom buddies. To him, it had always been a business transaction, and Barry had always seemed so quiet when he first got in contact with Leonard. Reserved, almost. In real life... he was a geek. A skinny little geek. He had not been prepared for that.

The trouble was that Barry was a sweet kid. Already, Len could see that. He had ‘good-natured’ written all over him. He was the kind of person who would help old ladies cross the street, donate to charity, take home stray cats he found on the street. And Len had never been that person. He was the hard-hearted type, who looked the other way and looked after number one. There were two possibilities here: Len would hurt the kid, which he didn’t want to do...or even worse, Barry might get under his skin. Len didn’t want anybody rooting around under there.

Clenching his jaw, he made an abrupt about-turn and went inside the bar he’d just walked straight past. He ordered something strong and threw it down without really tasting it, which was probably for the best. It burned on the way down like someone had shot a bullet straight down his throat, carving out a passage of sizzling flesh on the way down, and he grimaced. Slamming the glass back down on the bar, he left and started weaving his way back towards the grocery store like he had originally planned.

This was stupid. He was Leonard Snart. He didn’t let soft-hearted kids get to him. Living with Barry was purely a business transaction, and once he’d got on his feet and could afford to pay the rent on his own, he’d turf the kid out, or move out himself, and get a nice quiet place without forensic equipment on the kitchen table or Lady Gaga playing in the next room.

Grimly, he set his jaw and walked into the supermarket.

 

~*~

 

Len arrived back at the flat only to be confronted with the smell of something burning.

He stiffened on the stairwell, nostrils flared. He’d been friends with Mick Rory long enough to know what fire smelt like, and this didn’t smell like anything was actually alight, but whatever it was could not be far from the point of combustion. Tightening his grip on the groceries, he kicked the apartment door open and burst into the kitchen.

There was a loud yelp. Barry whirled around, immediately enveloped in a cloud of smoke that billowed from the oven. He was wearing a red and white checked apron with ‘kiss the cook’ emblazoned across the front, and a pair of oven gloves the size of baseball mitts. He looked distinctly guilty, and distinctly sweaty as well. Len narrowed his eyes at the oven, which was still pouring smoke out into the room; he snatched a tea towel off the worktop and yanked the tray out of the oven. There were several frazzled strips of what had presumably once been bacon lying on it, burnt to a crisp. There was a frying pan spitting and sizzling on the hob, with a curdling egg in it, and the whole kitchen was scattered with dirty pans and mugs and bits of cutlery.

Frowning, Len rounded on Barry, who held his hands up.

“I wanted to do something nice,” he said. “Like a housewarming.”

“Just a tip for you, Scarlet; housewarming doesn’t usually involve fire,” Len said. “It’s supposed to be a metaphorical kind of warmth.”

Barry wrinkled his nose. “Scarlet?”

Len tugged on one of his trailing apron-strings. “Would you prefer ‘Little Red’?”

“Scarlet is fine,” Barry muttered.

Pulling the tray out of Len’s hands, he tipped the bacon into the bin and pulled the frying pan towards him to start trying to scrape the bits of egg off. Exasperated, Len watched him for a moment, scraping away with a dessert fork. The first thing he did was switch the hob off, which Barry had quite clearly forgotten to do. Then, he switched off the oven, opened the kitchen window, and took the pan away from Barry, too.

“You can’t do anything with that,” Len told him. “You have to soak it first.”

Barry closed his eyes. “Oh my God. I swear to God I’m not usually this much of a disaster. I’m an adult. I’ve paid taxes before.”

“Whatever you say, kid,” said Len, dumping the pan in the sink and turning the tap on. “You realise there’s no way to salvage this? Unless you fancy having ashes for dinner.”

Barry slumped at the kitchen table, a little sulkily, and rested his hand on his chin. “I wanted to do something nice,” he grumbled.

“Did you consider buying me a bottle of wine instead?”

There was a moment of silence in which Barry appeared to be contemplating sticking one of the dirty forks into his eye.

“That would have made sense,” he said. “A lot of sense, actually.”

“I have an idea.”

Barry looked up.

“Let’s just order a take-out,” said Len.

~*~ 

He had not expected to spend his evening cross-legged on the living room floor, eating pizza straight out of the box with his new roommate, but it was a weirdly pleasant way to spend the evening. Barry had managed to blow a fuse when he was cooking and they couldn’t find the fuse-box, so they lit a few birthday candles and one fancy Yankee candle that supposedly smelt of electric chainsaw man-forest, or some other supposedly masculine odour, and ate almost in the dark. During this time Len found out that the only time Barry was silent was when he was eating; he wolfed down the pizza like he expected someone to take him from it if he didn’t hurry, and he scarcely seemed to take time to chew in between mouthfuls.

He ordered plain pizza, just tomato and cheese, which struck Len as singularly weird; nobody he knew ate plain pizza just on its own. Sara favoured pineapple, which was disgusting. Mick had several favourites, but usually opted for either a meat feast or something with lots of pepperoni. Lisa was the real freak; she liked tuna and sweetcorn on her pizza, which as far as Len was concerned ought to be illegal. But Barry ate his pizza plain, with garlic bread and dough balls on the side, and aside from the occasional mildly pornographic moan, he was quiet. It was nice. Weird, but nice.

The fact was that this was such a normal situation that Len didn’t quite know how to take it. He’d had roommates before - well. Cellmates, mostly. One who snored like a water buffalo, another who made fast food orders in his sleep. A few who smuggled drugs in and tried to hide them inside Len’s mattress. But even his real roommates had always been in some way unsavoury or unsanitary, and Barry was just so wholesome and cheerful that it made Len feel uneasy just looking at him. His smiles came easily and his body language was relaxed. He lounged on the floor or leaned against the furniture, and it wasn’t the practiced, faux-casual leaning that Len liked to do in order to seem at ease. Barry was genuinely comfortable in a darkened house with a relative stranger. His naivete was both appalling and sweet in equal measure. Len could only imagine what Lisa would have said if she’d seen him.

“So what did you say you do?” asked Barry, licking his greasy fingers.

Len contemplated lying, or telling him to mind his own business, but he figured it was important not to send mixed messages, and lying could come back to bite him in the ass later on. He didn’t want to tell Barry he was an accountant and then later get a job as a janitor and have to cover it up. Reluctantly he opted for the truth - a highly edited version, naturally.

“I’m between jobs at the moment,” he said curtly. “Hence the reason I’m a little bit strapped for cash. I need a little help with the rent while I get back on my feet.”

Barry made a sympathetic noise. “That sucks. What did you do before that?”

“Security,” Len said with the ease of a practiced liar. He _had_ dealt with a lot of security - usually dismantling it. There were very few things he didn’t know about CCTV cameras and burglar alarms - specifically the best ways of breaking them.

“Sounds dangerous.”

“It had its moments,” Len said, thinking wistfully of high-speed car chases, sprinting away from banks with a case full of money while he left trails of dollar bills behind him like gingerbread crumbs, him and Mick lugging heavy paintings through the sewers ready to display it before some shady art dealer who didn’t care to wait for an auction. Good times.

But he’d had a few too many near misses of late and he’d started to have mildly disturbing fantasies of white picket fences, picnics on checked blankets, maybe even a dog. A big, lollopy one that he could take for walks and play fetch with. He hadn’t told Mick about any of this, of course, just told him that he was taking a break and settling down for a bit, in a house that felt safe, as opposed to a Safe House which was never quite as safe as you thought. Sharing a creaky little apartment with a forensic scientist was a far cry from the domestic bliss he had envisioned, but he figured he might be able to work up to it. He might be equally at risk of having the house burned down as he would have been living with Mick, but he figured that rooming with Barry was less likely to get him shot, at least.

“Mmm,” Barry said thoughtfully. “I guess that is pretty dangerous. But there are a lot of jobs like that; my step-dad Joe, he’s a cop, and - ”

Len promptly inhaled a chunk of pizza and almost choked. Alarmed, Barry leapt across the room and started thwacking him on the back, trying to dislodge it. A few bashes and the pizza lump was dislodged, but Barry kept hitting him until Len almost ended up face-first in the pizza box.

“Enough!” he managed, and Barry leapt back anxiously.

“Oh God, I’m sorry - are you okay?”

“Fine,” Len choked, although he was starting to feel decidedly dizzy. He wasn’t sure whether it was the momentary air deprivation or what he thought he’d just heard come out of Barry’s mouth. “What - what did you say?”

“My step-dad’s a cop?” Barry said cautiously. “Are you sure you’re okay, Leonard? You look really weird.”

“I’m fine.” He picked up another slice of pizza and tried to look nonchalant. He kept his hand steady with some effort. Mechanically, he moved the food to his mouth and started chewing, but he couldn’t taste it properly. All of a sudden it was too greasy, making his stomach churn with unease. “Keep talking.”

“Uh,” Barry said. “Okay.” Presumably confused by Len’s sudden interest, he paused for a moment before adding, “Anyway, he’s had a couple of near misses; stray bullets, that sort of thing. Never actually been shot, but he’s been close. Iris - that’s his daughter, she’s my best friend - she wanted to sign up for the CCPD too, but Joe said no. Didn’t want to put her at risk, I guess. It sucks, because she would have been really good at it, but I’m glad she’s not going to be in any danger. And then obviously I work for the CCPD, but that’s not a dangerous job really, unless any of the bodies in the morgue decide to rise up and turn into zombies on me.” He chuckled.

Meanwhile, Leonard could feel himself turning a very watery shade of green, like a bar of cheap soap. Jesus Christ. He’d stumbled on a whole nest of cops, gone blundering right into their midst. Slowly, he put the slice of pizza down.

“You look terrible,” Barry said.

“Well aren’t you the charmer,” Len said, his mouth managing to carry on, thank God, while his brain whizzed frantically away.

Barry blushed right to the roots of his hair. “No, I - I didn’t mean - it’s not that you look bad, you just look sick. Not in a bad way, but not - I don’t mean like, _dude, you look sick_! I mean more in the context of, you know, you don’t look well. Not that that’s - I didn’t mean - ”

The kid was stumbling over himself, agonised. Len decided it was time to make a speedy exit.

“It’s fine,” he said. “You know what? You’re right, I actually don’t feel so good. I’m gonna call it a night, thanks, Barry.”

“Oh,” Barry said weakly. “Okay.”

Len got up, making very sure not to look at the kid as he sauntered out. Detachedly, he thought that he must be sending some ridiculously mixed signals - hot and cold, slamming doors in the kid’s face one minute and then buying him pizza the next, before making a dash for the exit at the drop of a hat. He must have been coming off as one hell of an enigma.

He managed to make his exit fairly calmly, even pausing to shove the pizza leftovers into the currently non-functioning fridge before he made his way into his room and promptly barricaded the door with the crappy little spinning desk chair the landlord had provided. Then, he collapsed onto the bed in a cold sweat.

What an idiot he’d been. Posting his real name on Craigslist, even a photograph of himself; he might as well have posted a mugshot and address straight through the CCPD’s letterbox. It was quite clear what must have happened. Barry was a plant. A secret operative, undercover. They’d sent him to lure Len in under the pretence of becoming his roommate and he was going to arrest him. Panic seized at his chest. He needed to get out. He needed to get out _right now._

 _Calm,_ said a cold voice in the back of his head. _Stay calm._

A fresh wave of panic drowned it out almost immediately, but there was still a flicker of it in the back of his mind and he seized upon it. Focusing, he brought it to the forefront, and then he managed to take a good, deep breath and pull that usual icy demeanor back over himself. Panicking never did anybody any good. Assessing the situation, however, would serve a dual purpose; to calm him further, and then to get him out of this mess.

His first thought was to walk out through the front door, claim to be going to buy advil or something and then make his escape. But no undercover cop worth their salt would let their suspect waltz straight out through the front door. He’d be in handcuffs the minute he touched the door-handle.

Rolling off the bed, he made his way over to the window and looked out. His heart was pounding. There was only a short drop from it, very manageable; the people in the apartment below had a balcony, and it would be easy to reach from here. Craning his neck, he was able to establish that the fire escape was a very reachable distance from the balcony, and from that he’d be able to reach the ground.

Even as this thought occurred to him, he knew he wasn’t going to do it. If he really meant it, he’d already be halfway to the ground by now. Already, his moment of paranoia was fading. Realistically if Barry was an undercover cop, why would he still be playing the game? He should have arrested Len by now. It wasn’t as if this was a drugs bust and he was lying in wait for Len to make a move, to start planning a heist. His last job with Mick had been several weeks ago, and Barry would have nothing to gain from waiting, other than an increased risk of Len cottoning on and scarpering. Besides which, Barry was way too goofy to be an undercover cop. There was no way he was acting; he was just an idiot. A sweet, puppy-like idiot.

Len blew out, his cheeks puffing outwards. He’d been on the run for way too long. He was starting to get scared of his own shadow.

Sitting down on the bed, he forced himself to take some more deep breaths until the tightness in his chest went away. Then, he started to think.

This didn’t have to be a deal-breaker. Sure, it made things complicated. Len’s face was well-known enough at the CCPD that if Barry’s cop stepfather walked through the front door then he probably wouldn’t have a lot of trouble identifying him, but there were ways around that. Most of these ways involved making himself scarce when anybody came over, which wasn’t the most complicated plan in the world, but complications tended to leave a lot of room for mistakes. The best-laid plans were often the simple ones.

If needs must, he could always uproot himself and start over. The smart thing to do would be to do it right now. Pack up and leave, before he’d had time to put down any more roots. Sure, Barry would be hurt, confused, ask questions, but what could he do with no one there to ask? A little Googling could tell him the basics; that his roommate was a felon and a crook. It was one of the reasons Len was having such a hard time finding employment. But if he was already gone by that time, he could falsify some new records, get a new identity. Driver's license, passport, the whole shebang. Then he could move swiftly on, find a new roommate and a new apartment and put the whole thing behind him.

In truth, though, that didn’t sound particularly appealing. He’d already unpacked, come up with a cover story and started to get comfy with his roommate. If he upped sticks and left right now, it would either mean leaving half of his stuff behind or having a very awkward conversation with Barry about why he was terminating their agreement already. All in all, he just wasn’t sure it was worth the hassle. Not for a moment of paranoia that was fading as quickly as it had come. The easiest and least suspicious course of action would be to try and act vaguely normal from now on. Almost having an aneurysm at the mere mention of the cops was hardly the most lowkey of responses.

He lay down on the bed, not bothering to take off his boots. Instead, he let his feet hang slightly over the edge of the bed, pulled the pillow down to compensate. He was a little cold, so he reached for his coat where he’d thrown it over the radiator, and pulled it over himself. The damn heating wasn’t working so it didn’t do much, but within a couple of minutes his body heat would start to warm it up.

It took him a while to fall asleep even so. The apartment was mostly quiet; Barry didn’t appear to be the kind of asshole roommate who would keep banging around and making a lot of noise when someone else was trying to sleep. But there were little noises that kept grating on his nerves. For one, the glass of the windows was almost certainly not double glazed and he could hear the whoosh of traffic roaring by every few minutes, just as he was starting to settle down. The first time, he sat up and glared at the window. After that, he just wrapped the pillow around his head and sulked.

Even so, he could still hear faint creaks and gurgles as the building shifted. They were on the top floor, and he heard footfalls tramping above his head every so often. He heard a toilet flush somewhere in the building and the faint sounds of TV from somewhere above or below. What ever happened to good old-fashioned soundproofing?

Len was just properly drifting off, the distant sounds of the traffic starting to sound fuzzy, when he heard a very distinct creak from directly outside his bedroom door. Habit had him fighting to wake up, but he’d been so close to actual sleep that the best he could muster was to raise his head and try to figure out what the noise was. He thought he could faintly hear the sound of breathing but perhaps that was his imagination.

Just as he was about to get up and beat the hell out of the intruder, he heard another creak and Barry whispered, “Night, Leonard.”

He didn’t wait for a response; he padded back down the hallway and Len heard his bedroom door click shut. Weird kid.

Still, Len was too exhausted to lie there pondering the strange behaviours of his roommate, although there were plenty to ponder. He allowed himself to loosen up again, and before altogether too long he was asleep.

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

Len woke with a jolt, by the sound of an enormous clatter coming from somewhere in the apartment. Lurching into an upright position, he was immediately assaulted by an outpouring of light streaming in through the window, which currently had no curtains. Groaning, he threw a hand up to protect himself.

It took him a minute to get his bearings; he didn’t recognise the room at first. But the sight of his familiar dog-eared paperbacks on the shelf and the stiff feeling of the clothes he’d fallen asleep in reminded him that he’d moved in with that kid off Craigslist and this was their first morning in the apartment together.

Frowning, Len stretched, his whole body creaking unpleasantly. His ankles in particular felt horrible; he’d slept with his feet hanging off the edge of the bed so that his boots didn’t track mud all over the covers and now it felt like his ankles were about to drop off. Scowling, he rolled his ankles to try and work some feeling into them and then there was another commotion from the kitchen. It sounded like an elephant running amok in a room full of kitchenware; saucepans clashing, cutlery rattling with a sound like a thunderstorm, and some muted swearing.

Groggily, Len got up and limped out of his room. Entering the kitchen, he found Barry in the middle of the room, surrounded by detritus. He was standing on one leg like a very wobbly flamingo; in one hand, he held a half-eaten cereal bar; the other held a shoe, which he appeared to be trying to put on one-handed. As Len entered, Barry shot him a look like he’d been caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

“What the hell is going on?” Len demanded.

“I’m late,” Barry said, as if this explained everything. “Here, can you hold this?”

He thrust the cereal bar into Len’s hand, put his foot up on one of the kitchen chairs and furiously started fastening his shoelaces. Len examined the cereal bar with mild disgust. Even with his eyes still clogged up with sleep, he could see that the thing was not particularly appetising. It looked to him like a lump of oats with cheap yoghurt drizzled on top and a few shrivelled raisins thrown in for good measure, and it had a large chunk taken out of it where Barry had started to eat it.

“What the hell is this?”

“It’s a cereal bar. I prefer to eat actual cereal, but I’m kind of in a rush. And the electricity still hasn’t come back on, so there isn’t a lot of point in getting any milk.”

Len groaned loudly. No electricity meant no kettle, which meant no coffee, which meant he’d spend at least half the day in a grumpy fog as his body tried to wake itself up without the assistance of caffeine. Aside from a good adrenaline rush, nothing else could successfully perk him up like a large amount of black coffee, and he didn’t think an adrenaline rush was likely to occur any time soon, now that he’d quit his criminal activities.

“I’ll call the landlord later and get it fixed,” he said grumpily.

“You’re a life-saver,” Barry said gratefully, taking back his cereal bar and cramming it into his mouth. Len pulled a face; personally, he felt like there would be more nutritional value in a lump of pencil sharpenings than in that monstrosity. “I gotta run - I’ll see you later?”

“I assume so, unless one of us gets hit by a car and doesn’t come home,” Len said dryly.

Barry wrinkled his nose cheerfully, then ran out through the front door in a display of energy which Len found quite frankly offensive to behold at this time of the morning. Muttering to himself, he tramped off to take a shower.

There was no hot water either, but that was probably a good thing; the cold water was hideous but bracing, and by the time he’d dried himself off, put on some clean clothes and had the presence of mind to make himself a coffee using the hob to boil the water instead, he felt ten times more alert. At least the damn gas was working.

After that, Leonard had a surprisingly productive morning. The first thing he did was to call the landlord and spend a good twenty minutes threatening grievous bodily harm if the man didn’t get the electricity turned back on as soon as humanly possible. It made him feel weirdly cheerful to threaten somebody with disembowelment, and the man certainly seemed to take the threat seriously, judging by the whimpering coming from the other end of the line.

Then, Len went out, did some proper grocery shopping rather than just picking up the bare essentials like he had the night before, and got himself a newspaper so he could look for potential job opportunities. By the time he got home, gratifyingly, the electricity had been fixed.

He spent an hour or so scanning the newspaper, actually about reading half of it, and then another half hour circling all the promising-sounding jobs in red pen and writing down contact numbers. He didn’t have any paper, so he used the back of a receipt, and when he was done doing that he decided he was bored and went to go and make an extremely extravagant and unnecessarily complicated dinner.

He was midway through eating the fruits of his labour when Barry got home, carefully laying his case down by the door. He not so carefully kicked off his shoes, leaving them in a heap by the doormat, and came into the kitchen where he stood and inhaled appreciatively. Then, a little self-consciously, he rubbed the back of his neck.  
  
"Hey, Lenny."  
  
"Only my sister calls me Lenny," Len said.  
  
"Oh. Right. Uh, hey, Len. Good day?'  
  
"Not bad. The electricity got switched on a couple of hours back, although I think I may have frightened the landlord. Solve any murders?"  
  
"Nope, but I did get to visit a crime scene and examine a man with the biggest ears I've ever seen," Barry said cheerfully. "No way could you sneak up on that guy. He’d have heard you coming a mile off.”  
  
"Sounds fun," Len said sarcastically.  
  
"Hey, with a job like mine you take what you can get."  
  
Barry went over to the cupboard and rooted around until he found some cheap packet noodles, the kind you add hot water to. He spent a couple of minutes fussing around with kettles and the like, and sat down at the other end of the table with a steaming mug full of noodles swimming in boiling water that might have tasted faintly of chicken. Disgusted, Len stared at the noodles. He hadn't drained them and he hadn't added any kind of seasoning either. Meanwhile Len sat opposite him with a meal that wouldn't have looked out of place in a gourmet restaurant.  
  
He hadn't expected Barry to be at his standard of culinary expertise - cooking was a hobby for Len and something he enjoyed, and he'd learnt from the best: Mick. The two of them had spent hours holed up in some safe house or another, perfecting recipes, trying out new ones, or even creating their own (sometimes with disastrous results.) Len hadn't expected Barry to be like that, the hours he kept didn't exactly leave much time for fancy cooking, but he'd expected the kid to at least be capable of making a decent mug of ramen noodles.  
  
They ate in companionable silence, but it didn't take Len long to notice that Barry wasn't eating with the same enthusiasm as he'd shown whilst demolishing that pizza the night before. He also realised that Barry kept giving covetous glances towards Len's plate. The aroma of his food was drowning out the weak, watery chicken smell of Barry's noodles and every so often the silence was broken by a discontented growl from Barry's innards.  
  
Another guilty glance made Len's resolve finally crack. He felt like he was dangling a doggy treat over the nose of a puppy.  
  
"You want some of this?" he asked, indicating his plate.  
  
Barry lit up with excitement like a veritable Christmas tree. "Really? You mean it?"  
  
"Sure. Why not?"  
  
The eagerness faded from Barry's face as if someone had pulled the plug on his fairy lights. "No, I can't. I can't eat all your food."  
  
"If you don't, it'll only go to waste. I can't eat all this by myself."  
  
It wasn't quite true. He _could_ have eaten it, but it would have taken him several days of living on leftovers of the same thing and he didn't relish the prospect.  
  
"You really mean it?"  
  
"It's all on the work-top," Len said. "Knock yourself out."  
  
"Thanks, Leonard!"  
  
Barry bolted for the pan with a ridiculous level of excitement and within seconds he was back at the table, wolfing it down. His noodles sat by his elbow, forgotten.  
  
Watching Barry's face brought Len no small amount of amusement. The kid ate like it was going out of fashion, emitting quite frankly pornographic moans every few mouthfuls. It was gratifying to see someone enjoying his food quite so much; Len knew he was a damn good cook but there was the inescapable fact that food always tastes better when someone else has cooked it and he sometimes lost his appetite somewhere between the whisking and the dicing and the stirring. Barry, meanwhile, ate with rapturous awe. Len half expected him to start crying at one point. If he'd been living on soggy, unseasoned ramen noodles for the past few years, Len could kind of understand why.  
  
"That was awesome," Barry said fervently when he was done eating.  
  
Len had just watched him all but lick the plate in his determination to clean it, and go back for not only a second helping, but a third. "I aim to please," he said with only the slightest trace of sarcasm.  
  
Grinning sheepishly, Barry stood up and reached for Len's plate.  
  
"What are you doing?"  
  
"Washing up," Barry said, like it was obvious.  
  
Len stared. "Why?"  
  
"You cooked, so I wash up. That's how it works, right?"  
  
Len frowned. He and Mick would happily cook for hours at a time but they inevitably argued over the washing up. At times it had even come to fisticuffs. They'd place bets on the outcome of a job; whoever stole the first item or dismantled the first alarm or punched the first security guard got a free pass on the washing up. To have Barry willingly volunteer to do it was bewildering.

He was almost certain that Barry would give up on the washing up before even half of it was done; there were numerous pots, pans, trays and dirty utensils strewn all across the room and cleaning them was a task that he would have balked at. Barry, however, cheerfully washed everything, splashing bubbles everywhere. Much to his astonishment, Len found himself joining in and doing the drying, putting all the utensils away because Barry saw fit to shove them all in nonsensical places, stacking them crookedly so that the next person to open the cupboards would be lost beneath an avalanche of saucepans cascading down onto his head. They made a good team; Barry washing, Len drying and putting everything away, and it was done within twenty minutes. It was remarkable, really. It wasn’t that it had never occurred to him and Mick to split the washing up, it was just that they were both too stubborn to agree to do any of it.

“We make a good team,” Barry said, pulling the plug to drain out all the water.

The sink burped and gurgled. “I wouldn’t go that far,” said Len.

“Well, then we don’t make a bad team.”

“We don’t make any sort of team.”

“Whatever you say, Lenny,” Barry said cheekily, and he threw the wet tea-towel over his shoulder and walked out of the room.

Len rolled his eyes. God, Barry was annoying. If Len wasn’t feeling so mellow, he’d probably have shot him. Nowhere fatal. Possibly in the leg.

However in spite of his grumblings, the arrangement had worked so well that it rapidly became routine. Len started altering his cooking times to correspond with Barry’s working hours. Barry bought home some rubber gloves and new tea towels. After the second week, by unspoken agreement they stopped buying separate groceries; Barry just paid for half of Len’s instead. Breakfast and lunch was down to the kid, Len wasn’t his personal chef after all - but every evening they sat down to a home-cooked meal, except for the occasional take-out on weekends.

Having something quite so concrete was bizarre to him. Len had never been used to structure - in fact, the only structure his life had had since dropping out of high school was the plans he laid out in preparation for a heist of some sort. This thing with Barry wasn’t set in stone, he could easily have deviated from it at any time, but it was a routine. A weirdly pleasant routine, for that matter.

They had been living together without incident for several weeks when the problem arose. It came out of nowhere, rearing its ugly head like a spot that erupts in your sleep - it wasn’t there when you went to bed, but come morning there was a veritable Everest looming on the tip of your nose, sore and inflamed and with a big yellow head.

Len had been job hunting for most of the day, which was a frustrating endeavor. Few people wanted to employ an ex felon, even one who had falsified most of his employment records and wiped the felonies off them. Perhaps he was just an intimidating person.

After a fruitless day he had gone for a drink with Mick and Sara. Mick rained scorn upon his desire to live a slightly less illegal life and expressed the opinion that he was an idiot, whilst Sara bought them both drinks (for Len to drown his sorrows, and Mick to shut his mouth) and applied liberal servings of sympathy. Neither approach worked as well as it might have, and Len was left feeling disheartened and a little sick. He had drunk and drunk without _getting_ drunk, until it was turning out time and he and Sara had half dragged Mick home and tucked him into bed, and all those beers were sloshing around unpleasantly in his stomach with nowhere to go. His eyes were getting that itchy ache that comes of being tired, and he was thinking wistfully of his bed, and the duvet he would pull over his head and the open window with the wind whistling past, and when Sara linked her arm through his and playfully offered to pour him another drink at her place, he batted her away with a groan.

“The only place I’m going at this time of night is my bed,” he grumbled.

Sara laughed. “You getting soft on me, Leonard?”

“Don’t push it,” Len growled.

“Whatever,” Sara said, giving him a shove. “Go sleep it off, Grandpa. Text me in the morning.”

He flipped her off - he wasn’t drunk, for God’s sake - and stuffed his hands in his pockets as he headed off home. It was a cool night, which was pleasant; it lessened that sick, bloated feeling as he took in deep lungfuls of air, like cold hands on his skin. He even unzipped his parka to get the full force of it as he walked. Drifting back to the apartment with his keys already in his hand, he was focused on very little but the thought of tumbling into bed (possibly fully clothed) and going straight to sleep, putting the whole disaster of a day behind him.

There seemed to be more stairs than usual. He trudged up them with his hands in his pockets, inserted his key into the lock, and turned it. There were still lights blazing inside; he could see a slender bar of light coming from underneath the door. It was unusual for Barry to stay up this late; the kid liked his sleep and he liked a lot of it. Bed by eleven and no notion of leaving it before eleven the next morning, that seemed to be Barry’s motto. Frowning, Len opened the door.

What he saw next was like a punch straight to the gut, knocking all the air out of him.

Barry was on the couch. There was someone on top of him - another guy, maybe a few years Barry’s senior but no more than that, with glasses and dark hair. The guy was clothed, but his shirt was mostly unbuttoned and it looked like he had been about to start on his jeans before Len walked in. They had both stopped dead, a pair of deer in the proverbial headlights, gawping at where he stood in the doorway.

Barry blinked at him. His hair was practically standing on end, and he was breathing hard, his cheeks flushed.

Len felt like someone had just tipped a kettle full of scalding water over his head. The shock of it knocked him senseless, so that all he could do was stand and stare at the two men on the couch. Thunderstruck, he just stood and looked.

Apparently, Barry was just as much at a loss as to what to do as Len was. Peering over the top of the other guy’s arm, he opened and closed his mouth idiotically. The flash-burn shock that had just hit Len like a lightning bolt had already vanished and been replaced with a far more insidious feeling, anger taking root and curling around his ribcage, hotter in his fists and his chest.

“Len,” Barry said. “You’re home early.”

“It’s 2am,” Len said flatly.

Barry blinked. An uncomfortable pause followed.

“Right,” he said. “I, uh. I guess we lost track of time.” Shifting uncomfortably, he looked up at the guy who was still straddling him, arms around his neck, making no effort to fasten his shirt back up again.

“Well this is awkward,” the guy said snidely. “Manners, Barry. Care to introduce me?”

Len hated him instantly. Actually, he was fairly sure he’d hated him even before he opened his mouth, this smarmy bespectacled prick lounging on _his_ sofa with his very _posture_ belying the most obnoxious arrogance Len had ever set eyes on - but his voice grated and he had a ridiculously entitled accent and Len did not think he had ever felt so tempted to punch someone without acting on it before. He was restraining himself for Barry’s sake, but his self-restraint was not a greatly utilised thing and he did not have much faith in it. He simmered like a pot mere seconds away from boiling over.

“Oh,” Barry said, flushing. “Right, sorry. Uh, this is my roommate, Leonard. Len, this is…”

There was a pause, which stretched on for a few seconds before becoming uncomfortable. Barry’s mouth continued to hang open but no more words came out of it. Two pink patches sprung up on his cheeks. Floundering, Barry struggled not to look at the guy on top of him, who was beginning to look distinctly unimpressed, or at Leonard, who was fighting a rather mean smirk. He couldn’t help it. Unintentionally or no, Barry had taken this guy down a peg or two - or ten. It was becoming painfully obvious that Barry had no idea what his name was. Agonised, Barry made a few vague ‘um’s and ‘er’s, his face steadily growing redder. Even Len started to feel less satisfied as Barry’s embarrassment grew.

“Hartley,” the guy said helpfully.

“Right,” Barry said weakly. “Hartley, uh. Rathbone.”

“Rathaway.”

“Rathaway,” Barry echoed.

He looked like he wanted to get lost down the back of the sofa, along with all the coins and pocket lint. Even Len could not fail to be a _little_ sorry for him at this point.

“We, uh, didn’t realise it was so late,” Barry said. Even his _ears_ were red, now. “We were in a bar and we got talking. Hartley works at S.T.A.R Labs. He’s a physicist, he’s like, a genius in his field. And in a whole load of other fields, actually. He was just telling me about this project he’s working on, it’s fascinating, actually - ”

In typical Barry fashion, he was rambling - although Len suspected that this was slightly more calculated than the usual drivel that came out of Barry’s mouth. He was trying to smooth over the edges - and salvage any good feelings of Hartley’s that he’d lost when he forgot the guy’s name. Well, Len had never pretended to be a nice guy, and he didn’t think much of Hartley Rathaway, so he felt no compunction to play along with Barry’s attempts at nicey-nicey.

“I’m amazed you managed to talk that much, what with having your tongues so far down each other’s throats,” he said coolly.

Barry had the good grace to look embarrassed - or rather, _more_ embarrassed. Hartley did not.

“It’s called multitasking, you might have heard of it,” he said. “It’s what people do when they’re able to concentrate on more than one thing at a time? Of course, only those of us with higher brain functions are capable - ”

Len eyed Hartley with steadily mounting dislike, and considered demonstrating his own multitasking abilities by kicking Hartley’s head in whilst berating Barry for his appalling taste in men at the same time.

“Well don’t let me interrupt,” he said, cutting Hartley off mid-sentence. “I can see the two of you are...in the middle of something.” He looked at Barry, studiously ignoring the prick perched on top of him. “You need anything before I turn in? I trust you have protection. You never know what you could be picking up.”

“I’ve been tested,” Hartley said obnoxiously.

“Like I’ve never heard that one before,” Len said coldly. “Unless you have the papers to prove it crammed in the pocket of those jeans, I’d suggest you wrap your cock. This guy pays half my rent, I have a vested interest in him not catching an STD.”

“I actually have taken care of that,” Barry said quietly, “but thanks, Len.”

The outrage on Hartley’s face was priceless. Pretentious prick thought he could get away with unsafe sex, did he? Not on Leonard’s watch. Not on Barry’s, either, by the looks of it. For a moment Len eyed them both carefully to make sure that Hartley wasn’t going to get nasty - he’d love to have an excuse to kick the bastard out - then, he noticed that Barry was determinedly not making eye contact with him and thought he’d better quit while he was ahead. Too much meddling in his roommate’s sex life did not bode well for the continuation of their house-sharing arrangement.

“I’m going to bed,” he said abruptly. “Night, Barry.”

Barry mumbled vaguely. Len made his retreat, resisting the urge to throw something at Hartley on his way out.

Safely ensconced in his bedroom, he bolted the door, kicked his boots off and then threw one of them at the door in a sudden burst of anger. It glanced off, leaving a smudgy dark mark on the panelling. Len rubbed it regretfully with the pad of his thumb; already he’d caused some damage that he and Barry would have to pay for when the lease ended. Great.

It was Barry’s fault, he thought bitterly, for bringing that floppy-haired prick into the apartment. If he’d managed to talk to him for long enough to find out all the boring details about the guy’s research projects, surely he’d talked to him for long enough to realise that he was a prick. It had taken Len about 0.5 seconds to figure that out and he was fairly sure Hartley hadn’t even opened his mouth before he’d made up his mind. At least Len thought he’d managed to royally fuck that relationship up before it started; even Barry couldn’t salvage the situation, now, and there would be no risks of Hartley actually sticking around. Even the thought of coming home to find him lounging around, making snarky comments and eyeing Barry like a slab of meat in a shop window… Len’s stomach clenched and he tightened his grip on the pillow he’d been plumping up.

Hurling the pillow onto the bed, he gave it a few punches before throwing himself after it and sprawling fully clothed onto the mattress. Sara had bought him some pyjamas, but he’d never got any further than opening them. They were still languishing in the back of some drawer with the tags on. Leonard was not a blue and white striped pyjamas kind of guy. Besides which, he preferred to sleep fully clothed for the sake of practicality. Years of criminal activity had taught him to be ready to run at any given moment and he didn’t fancy making a break for it wearing blue and white flannel. It had taken several weeks living with Barry before he’d even relaxed enough to sleep with his boots off.

He lay glowering at the ceiling, too worked up to sleep. Against his better judgement, he found himself straining his ears, trying to figure out whether Barry and Hartley had patched things up and picked up where they’d left off, or whether they’d already given it up as a bad job and parted ways. Unfortunately, he couldn’t hear anything - just water whooshing through the pipes, a gurgling from the boiler, and the occasional creak and groan that used to set him on edge but which he’d already grown used to. It was just the house settling. Barry had once expressed the opinion that the house was talking to them, to Len’s mild disgust. For such a clever guy, Barry could be an idiot. Case in point - bringing that bastard home. Len ground his teeth.

However, he couldn’t stew forever. It had been a long day, and he was beginning to grow tired. Too tired to continue thinking of uncomplimentary ways to describe Hartley (there were only so many synonyms for the word ‘prick’.) Too tired to focus on the unpleasant churning sensation in his stomach, which could no longer entirely be attributed to drinking too much. Too tired to figure out what the hell else was causing it.

At some point he grew too hot and wrestled his way out of his parka, dumping it on the floor. Burrowing his face into the pillow, he started to sink into the early stages of sleep, relishing that fuzzy feeling as he began to drift. He was vaguely aware of the front door clunking shut - aware enough to smile slightly as he pulled the duvet over his head.

The next thing he was aware of was sunlight blazing through the blinds he’d forgotten to close, almost aggressively bright. Grunting, Len pulled the pillow over his head, but it was too late - he was already awake. He got up, rubbed his face and grimaced at the stubble which was already growing there. He could also feel several indentations in his skin where he’d slept funny and the material of his clothes had left ridges. At least, he reflected, he didn’t have a hangover. After turning in so abruptly, without cleaning his teeth or downing half a jug of water, he ought to have felt awful. Instead, he just felt a bit muggy. That much, he could live with.  
  
He stomped into the kitchen, only to find Barry already sat at the table with a bowl of cornflakes. They had already congealed into several soggy globules that Barry was stirring uninterestedly around; it would appear that he’d been awake for some time. He looked up apprehensively as Len entered. Barry had dark circles underneath his eyes, his hair was unusually unkempt and he definitely looked like he could have used several hours’ extra sleep, but the most noticeable thing about his appearance was the distinctly anxious look on his face.

“Morning,” he said cautiously.

Len nodded curtly and made his way over to the kettle. Barry relaxed slightly; this was not unusual behaviour. It had not taken him long to notice that Len was not capable of civilised behaviour before his first cup of coffee.

In silence, Len made his coffee - black, no sugar, the sort of thing you drank because it was so disgusting that you could not help but wake up as soon as it touched your tastebuds. Barry waited patiently, swirling his cornflakes around, until around two thirds of the coffee was gone, and then he cleared his throat.

“I just wanted to apologise for last night,” he said sheepishly. “We, uh, we lost track of time. I know it was kind of awkward for you to walk in on us like that and - ”

“Barry. I couldn’t care less what you get up to in your spare time. It’s none of my business who - or what - you bring home. I would, however, appreciate it if you take some time to make sure the guy you’re getting off with isn’t a jerk before you bring him back here. I’d hate to spoil your love life by hurling the guy through a window, and last night I came perilously close.”

“So...you’re not mad?”

Barry was peeking at him from the corner of his eye and it was making Len mildly uncomfortable. You’d have thought he was the kid’s dad from the way Barry was eyeing him. Then again...he’d charged in all guns blazing, kicked off with the first guy Barry brought home and then given them both a safe sex lecture.

Oh, God. He’d turned into a middle-aged suburban father.

He had to contemplate the horror of that for a moment, before he realised that Barry was awaiting a response and beginning to look rather anxious about the lengthy pause in the conversation.

“No, Barry, I’m not mad,” he said, resisting the temptation to roll his eyes. “Just try and be a little more discerning in your tastes next time.”

There was a momentary pause as Barry continued to scrutinise him with a slight furrow between his eyebrows. Len raised his eyebrows right back at him, and after a few more seconds Barry stopped watching him and an enormous grin unfurled across his face. It was a little astonishing, that he was capable of smiling so hard, Len thought. But nonetheless impressive.

“You’re the best,” said Barry, going and tipping his cornflakes down the sink.

Len raised his eyebrows even higher, so much that it started to hurt, at the sight of all the cornflake mush floating down the drain. “I won’t be so accommodating if you block the sink, Scarlet.”

“Oh, right. Sorry.” He scraped half-heartedly at the few cornflakes that hadn’t already vanished down the plughole, put his bowl in the sink and grabbed a jacket off the back of his chair. Apparently he’d been sitting around waiting for Len to show up before going out. “I’d better go, I’m gonna be late for work. We’ll talk later, right?”

“Kind of hard not to, when we live in the same house,” Len pointed out.

Barry beamed at him. “You know you love me really. I’ll see you later, all right?” And he practically galloped out through the front door, all gangly legs with his coat flapping wildly around him.

Len rolled his eyes. It was like living with a stupidly tall five-year-old. Draining his coffee in one stinging gulp, he got up and started scrubbing Barry’s bowl, picking bits of cornflake out of the sink almost absent-mindedly as he did so. It occurred to him as he was drying the bowl that he probably ought to have insisted that the kid did his own damn washing up; despite his ridiculously young face he was a grown man, after all. But there was something reassuring about cleaning up, Len found. Like he was setting all his thoughts to rights, dusting them down and rearranging them, too. Besides which, it gave him something to do.

The prospect of doing more job-hunting today was not a welcome one, so after Len had finished clearing away the breakfast things he went around the house trying to clean up. There wasn’t much to do; despite Barry’s sheepish admissions that he wasn’t a particularly tidy or organised person, he didn’t seem to be making too much of a mess so far. Once he’d plumped up all the cushions on the sofa to get rid of all the evidence of Barry and Hartley’s rolling around the night before, and picked up a few bits off the rug (which really was just him being nit-picky) he couldn’t find much else to do, so he went into his room, fired up his laptop and started browsing the internet.

Unlike Barry, who could spend hours absorbed in screens of one sort or another, and who insisted on bounding into the room every few minutes to gleefully show Len ‘vines’ or cat videos, Len was not much of an internet person. He liked reading, but books were an expensive commodity and he was pretty sure he wasn’t welcome in the Central City library any more. He’d once made the mistake of taking Mick there when he went to pick up a few books, and the sight of so much ready kindling had been too much for the guy. Only a few paperbacks had gone up in flames before the fire department arrived and salvaged the situation, but Len did not think the incident had endeared him to the harpy-like librarians who roamed the stacks and he hadn’t been back since.

A few people had suggested ebooks, but Len greatly preferred the feeling of a physical book in his hands and screens tended to give him a headache after a while anyway. He didn’t have Facebook - in his criminal days it had seemed like asking for trouble - and there was little on Youtube that grabbed his interest, although again, he knew that Barry could spend hours on there, watching anything from science videos to gaming channels to FX makeup tutorials (Len thought it best not to ask.)

Perhaps this boredom was what eventually caused him to give into the itch that had been bugging him since he’d switched the computer on, and google Hartley Rathaway.

The first thing that came up was a huge article about how Hartley had been renounced by his parents after the revelation that he was gay. He’d had his cushy life and an even cushier inheritance ripped out from underneath his feet, and there were lots of contrasting shots of Hartley wearing fancy suits and looking smug with his parents, alongside less flattering photos of him wearing sweatpants and baggy hoodies and looking rather haggard. Even in these photos, he somehow managed to look painfully arrogant. Curling his lip, Len closed the article and opened another.

He did end up feeling slightly sorry for the guy. Clearly the fact that their son was some kind of genius had not stopped Mr and Mrs Rathaway from proclaiming him the spawn of the devil when he had come out to them, and although Len rather cruelly wondered if it had just been an excuse to get rid of him, he soon felt bad for such thoughts. Even someone as unpleasant as Hartley did not deserve to lose everything merely because he was attracted to his own kind (dicks.) Len went back to the main search page and soon dredged up a seemingly inexhaustible list of papers and research projects all with Hartley’s name on them, and all way beyond Len’s comprehension. The kid was a hard worker, and he was smart, you had to give him that. Given the way Barry gushed over his friends Cisco and Caitlin, and Star Labs, and his almost fanatical admiration for bigshot scientists like Dr. Harrison Wells, Len could kind of understand why he might have picked up Hartley Rathaway in a bar. Actually, speaking of Wells, there was a smug-looking bastard if Len ever saw one - and he had seen many. Clearly Barry had a type.

Irritated with himself, Len slammed the laptop shut all of a sudden. What difference did it make to him? Why was he wasting time and energy googling some guy Barry had almost slept with? It had nothing to do with him, and it seemed like Barry had no intention of seeing the guy again, so it was a moot point.

“I need a hobby," he said aloud. It sounded even more pathetic in the quietness of the room. He was talking to himself now. Leonard Snart, seasoned criminal, ex-convict and robber of ATMs, had been reduced to this. A loser who googled his roommate's one night stands and sat muttering to himself in the kitchen.   
  
He called Mick first and foremost, but was greeted immediately by an irate voicemail message threatening the caller with extreme violence if they didn't quit bugging him. Clearly he'd switched his phone off. Probably hungover, Len reflected, and therefore it wasn't worth the possibility of being punched in the face if he went over and disturbed Mick's beauty sleep. Besides which, although Mick was the closest thing he'd ever had to a friend, whenever they hung out it tended to include punching and plundering, both of which were habits that Len was trying to kick.

He tried Sara next. She answered on the third ring, annoyingly chirpy, and with a rushing noise in the background that made the speakers crackle with static. Grimacing, Leonard held the phone away from his ear.

“Got any free time?”

“Maybe,” Sara said. “When?”

“Now. The in-house entertainment has gone out for the day, Mick’s still playing Sleeping Beauty and if I have to fill in another job application I’ll shoot myself in the head. Care to entertain me?”

“Much as it pains me to turn down an offer like that,” Sara said dryly, “I’m en route to Starling City to see Laurel. Sisterly bonding, y’know? It’s been way too long since I’ve seen her. We’re gonna sit around in our pyjamas, drink wine and complain about everything that’s annoyed us over the past six months. It’s going to take at least three days to do it right.”

“How cute,” Len said sarcastically.

“Maybe you should spend some time with _your_ sister,” Sara said pointedly. “I haven’t seen her in a while.”

“Lisa and I have come to an arrangement,” Len said. “We’ll agree to disagree about the asshole she’s going out with as long as she keeps him well away from me so I’m not too tempted to shoot him. The current model has a fancy penthouse and a massive bank balance, so she’s quite content where she is for the time being. Just as soon as she gets sick of him, I’ll be more than willing to catch up on some quality time.”

“You two have a truly heart-warming relationship,” said Sara. “Look, I’m gonna have to go, I’m going to miss my connection. You’re a big boy Leonard, surely you can entertain yourself for a few hours.”

“Fine,” Len said. “But don’t come crying to me when you and Laurel start tearing each other’s hair out.”

“Bye, Leonard,” Sara said, and hung up on him.

Len frowned. Even Sara thought he needed a hobby, and it wasn’t as if she had a lot of hobbies herself, unless you counted hitting people and drinking a lot.

What did normal people do when they had some free time? Frowning, he considered. The only normal person he knew was Barry, whose primary hobbies seemed to be annoying Len, talking nineteen to the dozen and watching way too much television.

Television.

Netflix. That was something people did - spent an awful lot of time doing, actually, from what everyone would have him believe. Len had seen his fair share of old movies and could quote many of them at length, but the herd mentality of binge-watching inane TV shows for hours at a time had never appealed to him. Still, he supposed if you couldn’t beat ‘em, you may as well join ‘em, and at least if he’d seen a few episodes of the latest Netflix sensation he’d have something to talk about.

Sighing, he opened his laptop back up again. Barry had cheerfully given Len his Netflix password a few weeks back, not that Len had ever expected to need it. But he figured if it was a choice between his brain melting due to pure boredom, or melting because of an excessive amount of poor-quality television, he’d pick the latter.

  
~*~

 

“Leonaaaard! I’m hooooome!”

Len jerked awake with an unbecoming grunt to which he would never admit to. For a moment, he was disorientated, looking groggily around the kitchen as he tried to get his bearings. He focused on Barry, who was stood in the doorway wearing one of his ridiculous grins, and brandishing a bulging carrier bag in each hand.

“Were you taking a nap?” Barry asked gleefully.

“No,” Len said.

He had started binge-watching some TV show that everyone was banging on about, to the extent that even Mick and Sara were berating him for having not watched it. Len had given the first episode a go to see what all the fuss was about, and found himself embarrassingly invested within the first half hour. For the whole day he’d been watching all the episodes of the first season back to back, and he’d gotten about three quarters of the way through the season… and then the next thing he knew, Barry was hollering and waving plastic bags around. The laptop had been pushed aside and appeared to have gone to sleep (appropriate). There was a crick in Len’s neck that hadn’t been there before, and what looked suspiciously like drool on the kitchen table. Hastily, he mopped it up with his sleeve, hoping Barry hadn’t noticed.

“You were!” crowed Barry. “It’s okay. I won’t tell anyone.” He put his finger on his lips, which did nothing to disguise the huge grin on his face. “I got Chinese food!”

Now he mentioned it, Len could smell it wafting invitingly across the room. His stomach rumbled. He might have been too engrossed in the show to bother getting lunch. Maybe.

“I was going to cook tonight,” Len reminded him.

“I know,” Barry said, crossing the room and beginning to unload his spoils onto the kitchen table. The sight of the polystyrene containers made Len’s stomach grumble again. “But I wanted to apologise again for last night, so...truce?”

“I enjoy cooking, Barry, you don’t have to buy take-out all the time. In fact, you probably shouldn’t. Those stick limbs of yours won’t last long if you keep eating all this junk.”

Barry waved him away with the unconcern of someone who had never needed to regulate what he ate in order to continue looking like a rake. “I know. But...I kind of wanted Chinese food,” he admitted. “I got you crispy duck and prawn crackers.”

“My favourite,” Len said, reluctantly impressed. “How did you know that?”

Barry rolled his eyes and cracked open one of the containers. A mouth-watering smell filled the room. “It’s _everyone’s_ favourite. Except for Iris. Her favourite is seaweed - just seaweed, nothing else. Freak,” he said affectionately.

They settled down to eat in companionable silence. Barry could - and would - talk for England, even with his mouth full, but he seemed to have grasped the fact that Len was not so verbose and couldn’t tolerate constant chatter. The food was still hot - Barry must have hurried home to get it back without letting it grow cold; Len didn’t know where the closest Chinese restaurant was but it had to have been several blocks away. He was oddly touched by the gesture, even though by Barry’s own admission it was just as much to satisfy his cravings as it was to make peace between them for an argument that had already been resolved.

Len dealt with the clearing away. He did have to admit that a merit of getting takeout was that there wasn’t any washing up. As he was crumpling up the greasy paper that the containers had been wrapped in, he felt another twinge in his neck from where he’d slept oddly. Grimacing, he put a hand up to the join between neck and shoulder and squeezed it a few times, then carefully tilted his head to try and ease the crick out. It didn’t seem to help much.

“Everything okay?” Barry asked, looking up from his phone.

“Got a pain in my neck,” Len said. He refrained from making the obvious joke with some difficulty.

Barry’s eyes twinkled. “You sleep on it funny?”

Len made a face at him and turned away. For a minute, he could feel Barry smirking at him - then, the chair legs scraped across the kitchen floor as Barry pushed his chair back and got up.

“You want a massage?”

“ _What_?” Len said, turning so sharply that he almost fucked up the other side of his neck as well.

Barry was rolling up his sleeves. “Joe gets a lot of stress knots. Guess it comes with the job. Catching bad guys plays hell with your shoulders. You want me to take a look at it for you?”

“I’ll pass,” Len said dryly.

“Come on,” Barry said. “I’m good with my hands.”

He held them up enticingly. Len eyed Barry’s long fingers for a moment, before his neck gave another unpleasant twinge and he gave in.

“Fine,” he said.

Pleased, Barry patted the seat of the chair he’d just vacated and Len sat down, rolling his eyes as he did so. Barry made a great show of cracking his knuckles and stretching his fingers before he went to work, beginning to knead Len’s shoulders. At least he _seemed_ like he knew what he was doing; he was definitely going about it in a very businesslike manner. There was quiet again for a few minutes.

When Barry spoke again, his voice was a little hoarse. “It’d be a little easier if you took your shirt off.”

Len twisted around in his seat, ignoring the pain in his neck, to raise his eyebrows at Barry. The kid held his hands up defensively.

“What? I’m just saying.”

Rolling his eyes, Len turned around again. It took a few moments of deliberation - as a rule he didn’t much like to take his clothes off, it made him feel too exposed. But eventually he shucked the sweater and let it pool on the ground at his feet, which he probably wouldn’t have done if he hadn’t vacuumed earlier. He wasn’t wearing anything underneath it, and he heard Barry draw in a shocked breath at the sight of the scars on his back. There were relatively few - a gunshot wound that had almost missed, leaving him with a shallow furrow just above his hip; an ugly white pucker where he’d had a cigarette put out on him; a few minor knife wounds, badly stitched. It was probably a good thing the kid couldn’t see the front of him, which was in far more of a mess. For a moment, Len tensed, wondering whether Barry was going to comment. But after quietly taking it all in, Barry put his hands back on Len’s shoulders and got back to work.

Len ground his teeth; Barry was not being gentle. “I thought you were trying to fix my neck, not break it.”

“I’m trying to work all the knots out,” Barry argued. “ _Jesus_ you’re tense. I thought Joe was bad.”

It wasn’t a pleasant sensation, having Barry maul his shoulders like that. He could hear his muscles crunching and popping as Barry worked on a particularly stubborn knot, could feel it as he struggled to ease the tension out of it. Len gritted his teeth and resisted the urge to fight him off.

It took quite a while for the muscles to warm up and for Barry to warm to his role of masseuse, but once his hands had grown less cold and the cracking and popping of the joints had eased off, the pain started to ease. Barry’s fingers probed persuasively at a stubborn ache at the base of Len’s neck. Although he could still feel the discomfort from where Barry had been pummelling his muscles into submission, the places he was working on now were starting to feel more malleable and some of the tension was beginning to ease out of Len’s shoulders. He hadn’t really noticed it before it began to leak away, but the relief was palpable.

Eventually, Barry let go and stepped back, flexing his fingers. “Shrug your shoulders,” he said.

Len did so. The pain in his neck wasn’t exactly gone, but it had eased significantly and his shoulders felt amazingly loose. Astonished, he shrugged again, testing out the feeling. Aside from the residual ache from where Barry had initially been a bit rough, he felt great.

“Better?” Barry asked.

“Better.”

“You shouldn’t let yourself get so tense,” Barry said. “At the very least try to avoid sleeping on the table. That’s what beds are for.”

“Ha ha,” Len said sourly. “Exactly how long do you intend to hold this against me?”

Barry pretended to consider. “Hmm. For as long as you keep bringing up the apron.”

“Perhaps we’ll have to agree to a truce. You never mention this to anyone, and I quit making fun of the damn apron.”

“Really?”

“No,” said Len. “Your apron’s stupid.”

Grinning, Barry shook his head. “I knew you couldn’t do it.”

“I have a reputation to uphold, Scarlet.”

“Aw, come on. It’s only me. You know there’s no way I’m gonna fall for it any more; I’ve seen too much.”

“That settles it then. I’ll have to silence you. Tell me, how would you prefer to die - dismemberment, or decapitation?”

“Is ‘peacefully, in my sleep’ an option?”

Len pretended to consider. “Possibly. I know a guy. It’ll cost me but the end result would probably worth it.”

“Only probably?”

“Well, I’ve kind of been fantasizing about doing the job myself. My hands around your throat, choking the life out of you...”

“Kinky,” Barry said, hopping up onto the kitchen table.

“Get your ass off my table,” Len snapped, screwing the paper from the Chinese food at Barry’s head. It bounced neatly off his forehead; Len caught it and put it in the trash. Supremely unconcerned, Barry continued to swing his legs, his feet skimming the kitchen floor.

“Right, so you’re allowed to dribble on the table but I’m not allowed to _sit_ on it?”

Len glowered at him. “Don’t you dare tell _anybody_ about that.”

“What will you give me? I don’t take cash bribes. You’ll have to be creative.”

“Hm,” Len said sarcastically. “My soul? Oh wait, I don’t have one. My undying gratitude? ...Nope, don’t have that either. How about eternal servitude, and a kitten?”

“Ooh, tempting,” Barry said. “As much as I like kittens, the servitude is what’s caught my attention. Does that include you doing the dishes?”

“If it’ll save me the embarrassment of having Mick and Sara find out, Barry, I’ll do anything you want.”

He was waiting for another witty remark, but Barry suddenly went pink and became fascinated with his shoelaces. Something very strange was happening to the corners of his mouth; they kept twitching, and he was busily looking anywhere but at Leonard, who looked at him in complete bemusement.  
  
Eventually, Barry mumbled something that sounded distinctly like "Don't make promises you can't keep,” and blushed furiously.   
Len couldn't resist winding him up a little. "Oh, Barry, Barry, Barry. When will you learn? There are very few things I wouldn’t do.”

This was apparently too much for Barry, who made a faint choking noise and turned deep crimson. Well, it was understandable. He was probably imagining all of the many dreadful and violent things that Len had assured him he was capable of doing, and wondering if he was next on the kill-list. Len decided to take pity on him. Moving across the kitchen, he clapped Barry on the shoulder; the kid jumped out of his skin, which caused Len to make an amused noise in the back of his throat.

“Relax, Barry.”

“Sorry,” Barry said faintly.

“It’s a joke. You are familiar with the concept?”

It took Barry a moment to rearrange his face into a rather strained smile. “Yep,” he said. “Just a joke. Got it.”

Shaking his head, Len headed out of the kitchen, planning to get in the shower before Barry could beat him to it and use up all the hot water. Perhaps it was his imagination, but he could have sworn he heard Barry let out a heavy sigh just as the kitchen door clicked shut.

  
~*~

 

It was one of the first strange moments that passed between them, but certainly not one of the last. The next one of note occurred a week or so later, when Len was returning home after an impressively awful job interview. Storming up the staircase to their apartment, he hurled the door open, did the customary swerve to avoid all of Barry's shoes strewn across the entranceway and then stalked through the living room, where Barry was sat on the sofa reading.  
  
Barry looked up as he came in. "Len? Is everything okay?" 

"Peachy," Len snapped, and he went into the kitchen cupboard and pulled out a bottle of vodka. Sloshing a generous measure into a glass, he downed it and grimaced at the burn. It was like downing lighter fluid, the heat licking the inside of his throat, spreading through his belly and to his toes. Slamming the glass back down, he poured another measure.

Gingerly, Barry stepped into the kitchen. "Did something happen?"

"Job interview," Len grunted.

Barry's face lit up. "Hey, how'd it go?"

Len glared at him and raised his glass irritably.  
  
"Oh," said Barry. "Right." He fidgeted a little. "What happened?" 

"I didn't get the job," Len said harshly. "They were willing to overlook my criminal record and lack of a GED but apparently my bad attitude was the final straw."

"...Criminal record?" Barry said hoarsely.

Shit. Len’s clumsy, slightly numb mouth had just dropped him right in it. He’d forgotten that Barry didn’t know about any of that and, as any decent law-abiding citizen might, he looked understandably alarmed. Resisting the urge to swear and throw his glass at the wall, Len simply took another sip. Christ. Vodka was disgusting and he’d need a lot more than this to get him even close to as drunk as he’d have liked to be.

“I was young, once. I had a misspent youth,” he said.

Barry relaxed slightly, although he still looked worried. Hard drinking at four in the afternoon was hardly going to allay his fears, but Len figured there was little point in stopping now, so he merely offered Barry the bottle.

“Uh, no thanks,” said Barry.

“Come on,” said Len. “You’re the kid, not me. Live a little.”

It was a clumsy jibe, but it hit home. Barry’s jaw clenched.

“I’m not a kid,” he said, and swiped the bottle.

Len watched him to make sure he didn’t cheat - he downed a pitifully small mouthful and then choked, coughing violently. Hastily, Len took the bottle away to make sure he wouldn’t drop it.

Staggering around the kitchen, choking dramatically, Barry leant over the sink and dribbled what was left of the vodka out of his mouth and down the drain, before swilling his mouth out with water and spitting. By the time he resurfaced, his eyes were red and streaming and Len had cheered up immensely.

“Can’t hold your liquor, huh?”

“I can so,” Barry said defensively. “I just...don’t usually drink it straight.”

“It’ll put hairs on your chest. Seems like you’re sorely lacking in that department.”

“I don’t like hairy chests anyway,” Barry sniffed.

“I’ll bear that in mind.”

There was a bit of a weird pause after that. Barry was staring at Len as though he had grown an extra head. Uncomfortably, Len turned away from him and pretended to be looking out of the window. Not that there was must to look at. The view from their apartment comprised mostly of more apartment blocks with the occasional tree, and a glimpse of the main road if you craned your neck a little. Still, by the time Len turned back around, Barry was looking relatively normal again and Len could relax.

“You ever played beer pong?” he asked conversationally.

“Nope.”

“Well then it’s time you learned,” Len said, and he put the vodka down on the kitchen table. “Got any cups?”

They had no plastic cups, so they settled for an assortment of novelty mugs, drinking glasses and the odd mason jar. Neither of them had a tennis ball but Barry managed to root out an old ping-pong ball from somewhere and the game began. In the interests of avoiding alcohol poisoning, vodka-pong became vodka-and-coke pong, but it still didn’t take long for them both to be well and truly off their faces. Giggling, Barry hung off the end of the table, trying to aim at one of the glasses. Even sober, he was a terrible shot; Len had taken to drinking half of the glasses he missed just to even up the score a bit.

“I’m sorry about the job,” Barry told him. He threw the ball and it landed in one of the glasses with a plop - not the one he’d been aiming at, but nevertheless Barry raised his fists and cheered in mock victory.

Rolling his eyes, Len fished out the ball and took a sip of his drink. “There’ll be other jobs. Anyway, I’m not sure I’m cut out for that kind of work.”

“What work is that?”

“Stripping,” said Len. “Pays well, but I just can’t stand it when people objectify me.”

Barry snorted and coke sprayed out of his nose. Smirking, Len leaned back against the kitchen counter and took another sip of his drink.

After a minute or so of snorting unattractively and trying to clear his nose, Barry said, “In all fairness, you’d be a pretty hot stripper.”

“Now _you’re_ objectifying me!” Len said. “In my own home!”

“ _Our_ own home,” Barry corrected. “I live here too.”

“Much to my chagrin. I keep trying to get rid of you, but somehow you keep coming back.”

“You’ll never get rid of me,” Barry said. “I’m going to follow you around forever…”

“Like a bad smell…”

“Yeah…” Barry suddenly realised what he’d just said. “No, wait - ”

Laughing, Len put his drink down and went to ruffle Barry’s hair, but Barry tried to twist out of it so Len got him in a headlock and rubbed all his hair up the wrong way with his clenched fist, while Barry wriggled and protested like a kitten being washed. Before long Barry resembled a very bedraggled hedgehog and Len let him go. Stumbling away, Barry almost fell and Len put out a hand to steady him, grabbed the front of his shirt and then realised they were far closer together than he’d initially thought.

Pink in the face and still giggling weakly, Barry looked at him. His grin softened, becoming far more subdued but his eyes were still dancing. Len found himself grinning back, unable to help himself. Unsteadily, Barry put another hand on Len’s arm, and he bit his lip. Len watched the colour drain from it with something close to fascination, then remembered himself and helped the kid to steady himself before letting him go.

“Thank you for living with me,” Barry said.

Len raised an eyebrow. “You getting soft on me, Scarlet?”

“No. But it would be nice if you said thank you to me, too.”

Pretending to think about it, Len said, “Thanks for paying the bigger half of the rent. I wasn’t going to mention it until the next bill came through, but I told the landlord we’d be paying not so much fifty as seventy-five twenty-five. I hope that job of yours pays well.”

“You’re an asshole,” Barry said, beaming all over his face.

“I know, kid. I know."


	3. Chapter 3

Len woke up early the day after that, and sat smugly with his morning coffee cupped in his hands, warming his fingertips, whilst Barry returned to his usual morning routine of hopping around like a headless chicken, shovelling cereal into his mouth, adding extra notes to one of his reports and trying to fasten his shoelaces at the same time. It was at times like these when Len felt rather pleased that he was unemployed and didn’t have to go through this rigmarole. 

“While you’re out, can you get groceries?” he called lazily. “There’s a list on the fridge.”

Barry, who had a forensic report clamped between his teeth, pulled the note off the fridge door and carefully slipped it in between the pages of his report. Len hoped he wouldn’t forget and later present his boss with a request for two pints of milk and a selection of mixed herbs.

Barry removed the report from his mouth and slipped it underneath his arm instead. “Sure, but I might be late. I’ve got a date tonight.”

All of a sudden, Len felt very hot. It was a sudden flood of heat as if someone had just opened an oven door directly in front of him. Irritably, he tugged on the collar of his sweater. “You never mentioned you were seeing anyone.” 

Not since Hartley. In fact, ever since Hartley, Barry seemed to have lost all interest in romantic conquests and had been quite happy to snuggle up on the sofa in baggy jumpers and sweatpants, telling Len all about his day, babbling about TV shows he was watching, reading books (and frequently commenting on what was happening, or else gasping or laughing every once in a while, which made Len jump) or even doing nothing at all but lazing around. The news that Barry was actually seeing someone had come as a shock - and he was actually quite astonished that Barry hadn’t told him, since he seemed to tell him everything else. Len was the first to admit that he didn’t take in even half of what Barry was babbling on about, but he was growing used to just letting it wash over him like background noise and Barry didn’t seem to mind that he wasn’t getting much of a response.

Shrugging on a jacket, Barry said, “It’s early days. We’re going out for dinner tonight, so I might be back late, but I’ll drop by the store on my way home.” Pausing, he gave an excitable look in Len’s direction. “He’s a really nice guy. Maybe once I get to know him a bit better, I can bring him over here and you can meet him!”

“Great,” Len said sarcastically.

Apparently his sarcasm was lost on Barry, who beamed gratefully before rushing out through the front door. Leonard allowed himself a moment to feel guilty for being mean, but he quickly brushed it off. It wasn’t as if Barry had noticed anyway. 

He had no idea why he’d had such a visceral reaction to the news that Barry was going out tonight. His loathing for Hartley was easily explained - the guy was, after all, a tool. But this new guy was an unknown quantity, who had never even been mentioned before and whose name Len didn’t even know, and yet he was pissing Len off almost as much as Hartley had. It was definitely the thought of him causing these weird feelings; just thinking about him made the heat spread throughout Len’s body like a rash, hot and itchy and unpleasant. Just to work off some energy, he got up and paced up and down the kitchen a few times, looking regretfully at his coffee. He hadn’t finished it, but it didn’t seem likely to help his jitters much. 

After a few laps of the kitchen, he decided that he was probably just feeling weird about Barry being out when Len had grown used to his presence. Even when they didn’t sit together in the living room, doing their own thing, he was aware of Barry in the house - singing in the shower, rattling cutlery, humming away in his room, the click of the mouse of his laptop or the tapping of fingers on a keyboard, pages flipping or whatever the hell else it was that reminded him that he wasn’t alone in the house. It was bound to make him feel edgy. They had a routine down and it was being altered, it was bound to bother him.

That being the case, it made sense that the best way to rid himself of this feeling would be to have some company to fill the gap.

~*~

“Nice place you got here," Sara said, circling the room at a leisurely pace. She appeared outwardly casual but Len knew she was taking in every detail with the keen eyes of someone used to scoping a place out before they got comfortable.  
  
Shrugging, he folded his arms. He wouldn't exactly describe himself as houseproud - that was a term he associated with frilly suburban moms who wore aprons and clucked fondly whilst brandishing fluffy dusters and making brownies. Regardless, he'd had a quick run around with the vacuum cleaner before she arrived. He'd also finished off the washing up and organised Barry's pile of sneakers that he would insist on leaving in a pile by the front door, where he tripped over them every day on his way out. It was a miracle he'd never yet gone out in a mismatching pair. Len had spent a good twenty minutes putting them all into pairs and placing them in neat rows, even though he knew the effect would be ruined as soon as Barry got home.  
  
Sara reached into the fruit bowl on the worktop and selected a gleaming apple, which she bit into with a crunch. Juice spurted down her wrist and Len watched her lick it away, tracing back up the trickle with her pointed pink tongue. The fruit bowl was a new addition; he'd acquired it in the hope of persuading Barry to eat something with some actual nutritional value. Skinny he might be, and active-ish (Barry was always late and therefore always in a rush and Len didn't think he'd ever seen the kid walk anywhere; he was always hopping or running or waving manically at taxi drivers) but the kid was still destined for a heart attack before he was thirty if he didn't start eating something more nutritional than microwave meals or take-out. 

“So how’s your new room-mate?” she asked.

“He’s messy, he can’t cook, he never cleans up after himself, he listens to shitty pop music and he never stops talking. It’s like living with the world’s most irritating puppy dog.”

A grin unfurled across Sara’s face. “You like him.”

“What make you say that?” 

She shrugged good-naturedly. “If he was really that annoying, you’d have shot him by now.”

Len curled his lip but was forced to concede defeat. It was true; he might have renounced his life of crime but he would not have been totally opposed to doing away with his new roommate and burying him under the patio if he’d turned out to be a total jerk. For example, if Hartley Rathaway had turned up on his doorstep asking to share his lease, Len would have had no qualms whatsoever about shooting him - or at least inviting Mick round to set the guy’s eyebrows on fire.

Sniffing, Len went and sat down on the couch. Sara joined him, grinning like the Cheshire cat. Flopping down at the opposite end of the sofa, she swung her legs up onto the seat and rested her feet in Len’s lap, boots still on. He flicked her irritably but after that, he just gave up and let her do it. Sara smirked at him.

“So where is the boy wonder?” she asked lazily, lobbing her apple core into the bin by the TV. It landed perfectly, with a soft clang, and Len rolled his eyes as she fist-pumped the air. 

“Work,” he said.

“When’s he back? I’d like to meet this mysterious guy who’s apparently so irritating that you can’t bear to get rid of him.”

“Don’t know, don’t care. He’s got a date tonight.”

“Aww, cute,” said Sara. “What’s she like?”

“Male,” Len said, “and probably a dick if past experience is anything to go by. All I care about is that he doesn’t bring him back here; I nearly dismembered the last guy I found on my couch, and that was  _ before  _ he opened his mouth.”

“Jealous, Leonard?” Sara teased.

Len shot her a dirty look. “Hardly.”

“I see how it is. Your roommate has gone off gallivanting, doing young people things, so you invited me round to fill the hole.”

He snorted at her and picked up the TV remote, forcing himself to make eye contact so that she wouldn’t realise just how close that was to the truth. It wasn’t that he missed Barry - he was just used to having him around. The creaks and groans of the house settling seemed eerie without someone else to cause them; no clinking of spoons as someone added far too much sugar to their tea or tripped over their own feet or rustled the pages of a magazine with a bit too much vigour. Besides which, he disliked feeling like he was just sitting around waiting for Barry to come back. He wasn’t - but when the house was alone and he was in it, that was what it felt like. It felt pathetic.

“Has Mick met him yet?” Sara asked as Len flipped through the channels.

He tensed slightly, hoping she hadn’t noticed even though he knew that she had. It would have been obvious even to someone who wasn’t as observant as Sara, even someone who wasn’t used to taking in whole rooms in one glance and analysing their entire contents.

“I haven’t told him about Mick,” Len said curtly. 

She raised a questioning eyebrow.

“Barry doesn’t know about my...extra-curricular activities. As far as he’s concerned, I’m a fairly law-abiding citizen who’s fallen upon hard times and the only real obstacle in the way of my getting a job is a few mild strikes on my criminal record. I haven’t told him what; let him assume they’re minor traffic violations, or maybe some littering. I’ve done a pretty good job of covering my tracks in terms of my criminal career. But Mick…”

“Looks like a thug.”

“That too,” Len admitted. “But mostly… he doesn’t think much of my decision to get onto the straight and narrow. I don’t want him coming in here shooting his mouth off, or shooting in general. And the other issue is that Barry’s a cop.”

Sara choked. “ _ What _ ?”

“Well, not a cop. He works for the CCPD, he’s in forensics. But we all know how Mick feels about the feds, and I don’t fancy coming home to find my apartment burned to the ground and my roommate lynched on the front lawn.”

“Jesus, Leonard,” Sara said. “You sure can pick ‘em. You turn your back on a life of crime and move in with a fed? What if he picks up your face on the police database?”

“He’s a forensic pathologist, the only reason he’d have to be searching for my face would be if I’m dead, and I think by that time I’d be past caring. Besides, it makes things interesting.”

“That’s not how I’d describe it,” Sara muttered. Then, “Can you quit doing that?”

Len looked at her. “What?”

“Flipping channels. It’s giving me a headache. Just pick something, or switch it off.”

Len switched it off and tossed the remote onto the other couch, the one where Barry usually sat. He threw it with a little more force than necessary and Sara raised her eyebrows at him.

“What is your problem, Leonard?”

“Sick of being cooped up in this house, for starters,” Len snarled at her. “Out of work, out of crime, out of luck, and almost out of money. Also out of options. It’s either go back to the old life or start explaining to Barry why I’m not paying my share of the rent, which I won’t be able to do for much longer.”

Sara swung her legs back off the couch, got up, and took her boots off. She squared up to him, clearly getting into a fighting stance. Len raised his eyebrows at her.

“Quit bitching,” Sara told him. “It’s a mess. So fix it. Just sitting here stewing in it helps nobody.”

“So what do you suggest I do?” Len snapped.

“Take a beating,” Sara said. “I know you’re itching for a fight, Leonard, you’ve got it written all over you. Well, look who’s offering.”

“I don’t want to fight you,” Len told her with mild disgust.

“Sure you do,” Sara said, and aimed a kick right at his head.

Len stopped it fairly easily, grabbing her ankle when her socked foot was mere inches from his cheek, and yanking her off balance. She wrenched her foot free, got her balance back and then threw a punch that he blocked with far less ease. Warily, he got up and circled the couch.

Sara tossed her hair and grinned at him. Then, she leapt.

The fight that followed was fairly tame, considering that they could probably have beaten each other to a pulp - especially if Sara had made use of some of the scaffolding that the builders had been using to prop up the apartment several days before. They regulated their scuffles to avoid damaging any furniture or disturbing the neighbours, but Sara was not gentle and Len gave as good as he got.

About half an hour later they flopped back onto the couch, panting and sweaty. Len’s cheeks were peony and he had to roll up the sleeves of his sweater in order to cool down. Sara’s cheeks were dishevelled; she had a slight bruise on one cheek from where Len had accidentally hit her a bit too hard, but that was okay, because he had claw marks down his ribs from where her nails had raked him right through his sweater. Sara was still grinning. In spite of himself, Len turned his head to smirk at her.

“Better?” she asked. 

“Better,” he agreed. 

“Good,” Sara said. “Now let’s get something to eat. Kicking the shit out of you has made me hungry.”

Scoffing, Len made his way over to the fridge and had a quick rifle through. The only thing that really stood out to him was some salmon that he’d got in because Barry had been waxing poetic about this one time Len had grilled some salmon for them both and put a few herbs and some lemon on it, and apparently the kid had never tasted anything he liked better. 

_ Shame he’s not here then, isn’t it,  _ thought Len, and he pulled it out of the fridge. “Salmon?”

“Suits me,” said Sara. “Need any help?”

“Please,” Len said scathingly, and left her on the couch to watch one of the shows he’d skipped over during his channel-hopping session.

~*~

There was none of Barry’s usual greeting when he opened the door at ten past nine. Surprised, Len checked his watch, then the wall clock. Nope, time was right. 

“You’re back early,” he called. “How’d your date go?” 

Horribly, judging by how early he’d got home. Len couldn’t help but be smug about that. Of course, Barry had picked another asshole to go out with. 

“Had to cancel,” Barry said grumpily, and Len heard him kicking off his shoes with blatant disregard for the system Len had implemented earlier as he’d paired them all up. He couldn’t bring himself to be mad about it. “I had to work late,” Barry added from the hallway. “Singh needed me to do overtime. Inconsiderate murderers don’t hold back on killing someone just because it’s date night, apparently.”

Barry came in looking frazzled, his cheeks pink, hair standing on end and his posture slumped. He stopped dead in the doorway, his equipment bag dangling from his shoulder, staring.

Len and Sara had resumed their position on the couch, seated at opposite ends with Sara’s feet resting casually in Len’s lap. Barry paused for a moment, taking in the scene with considerable wariness.

“Sorry,” he said slowly. “Am I interrupting something?”

“Nope,” Sara said cheerfully. “Just two sad bastards watching some documentary about fish.”

“Barry, this is Sara,” said Len. “Sara, Barry.”

“Hi,” said Sara.

“Hey,” Barry said, with a considerable lack of his usual enthusiasm.

Len studied his face for a moment. There were dark circles underneath Barry’s eyes, which looked kind of bloodshot. His lips were puffy and sore-looking, like he’d been biting on them. He looked kind of a mess, basically. Maybe he was coming down with something. Len sure hoped not; he didn’t want to get sick. He made an obnoxious invalid, shuffling around the house grumbling and snotting, and he was certain that if Barry had caught something, Len would be next.

“Can I smell salmon?” Barry asked, putting his bag down by the front door.

“We already ate,” Len said. “There’s none left. Sorry.”

Barry visibly slumped and Len suddenly felt extremely bad, in spite of the fact that if he was honest with himself, he’d cooked Barry’s favourite meal out of spite. As if to say,  _ serves you right for not being here.  _ To pay him back for going out and disrupting the new status quo they had established. Leonard had invited someone else around to intrude on their space and eat food that he’d originally been saving for Barry and even though he had never expected it to be of much consequence, or for Barry to even notice, he felt like a dick.

“I thought you’d be eating before you got back,” he said. “I didn’t know you cancelled your date.”

“It’s fine,” Barry said wearily, hanging his coat up and trudging towards the kitchen.

Len twisted in his seat. “I can make you something.”

“It’s fine,” Barry said. “Really.”

He vanished into the kitchen. There were some clatters and bangs and then Len heard the toaster being switched on and realised that the kid was making himself a piece of toast. For some reason that made him feel ten times worse, considering that he and Sara had been eating expensive gourmet salmon not half an hour ago that was supposed to be Barry’s.

“Give us a minute,” Len said quietly, tapping Sara’s legs.

Wordlessly, she moved them, tucking her feet underneath herself as she turned her attention tactfully to the television. Len got up and went into the kitchen.

Barry was stomping about with a butter-knife, whilst the toaster smoked faintly with two far-too thick slices of bread wedged into it. Len crossed the room, unplugged the toaster, eased the two pieces out and then picked up the abandoned bread-knife on the sideboard and sliced them again. He popped them back in the toaster, putting the extra two slices back in the packet. Barry watched him sullenly, folding his arms and leaning back against the counter.

“You slice them too thick,” Len said. “If you have to cram them into the toaster then you haven’t cut them thinly enough.”

“Yeah, well maybe if you bought sliced bread like a normal person,” Barry said defensively.

Silence reigned for a moment. Barry fidgeted. He put the butter knife down, leaving a smear on the worktop, picked it back up again, wiped it with a dish cloth, put it away and then hesitated for a minute to judge himself as he realised that he actually wasn’t done with it, but didn’t want to embarrass himself by getting it back out. Len waited patiently. He was good at not-talking; he knew from experience that most people weren’t, and shutting up was a great way to get other people to talk - especially Barry, who seemed to be allergic to silences, awkward or otherwise.

“I didn’t realise your girlfriend was here,” Barry said eventually.

“Sara isn’t my girlfriend,” Len said levelly. “She’s a friend. I told you about her.”

“Well she sure acted like your girlfriend,” Barry said huffily, folding his arms even more tightly.

This seemed like a bizarre statement to make, unless you considered the fact that Len was in general a rather closed-off person. He didn’t do displays of affection, personal or otherwise. In the entire time they’d lived together, whilst Barry paraded legions of friends and love interests throughout the apartment for Len’s inspection, Len had never once brought anybody home before. He kept a careful distance between himself and anyone; he didn’t do hugs, high-fives or pats on the back - at least, not regularly - and he always sat on the opposite side of the room to Barry when they shared the living room of an evening (although more often than not Barry ended up cuddled up next to him anyway). He supposed that for Barry, finding Len sharing a sofa with a woman was condemning enough even if it hadn’t been Sara, who tended to treat him as part of the furniture anyway. The easy contact between himself and Sara was something he had grown so used to that he didn’t tend to question it, but it probably looked weird to an outsider. And, of course, he’d invited her round when he had the apartment to himself and cooked her a fancy dinner. It wasn’t such a far-fetched assumption to make, really.

“I just find it funny how it’s okay for you to invite your girlfriend round but it’s World War III whenever I try to bring a guy over,” Barry rambled. “I mean sure, Hartley was a dick but I saw how you looked when I started talking about Jeremy and I could tell from the look on your face that you were going to have a problem with it, and that’s why I never invited him around here even though it would have been way more relaxed for a first date - ”

“Sara isn’t my girlfriend, Barry,” said Len firmly, because he had learnt from past experience that it was best not to let Barry get started unless you wanted to pull up a chair and listen to him babble incessantly for the next forty minutes.

“ - And he’s a really nice guy and I didn’t wanna pressure him to pay for my food or anything, which is kind of hard to avoid when you’re in a restaurant setting and - what?”

“Sara isn’t my girlfriend,” Len repeated patiently. “She’s a very good friend. You may have noticed that I don’t have many of them.”

Barry mumbled vaguely and rubbed the back of his neck, clearly feeling that it would be rude to say that he  _ had  _ noticed.

Len added, “It probably hasn’t escaped your notice that I’m a very closed off person. Sara is one of the very limited number of people I feel comfortable with, so if it seems like I’m way more intimate with her than I am with other people, it’s just because we’ve known each other for a long time. It’s not because I’m in a relationship with her.”

“That still doesn’t explain why you’re so against me bringing guys home,” Barry said defensively.

There were many ways in which Leonard could have responded to that. The first - and least likely - would be to explain (or at least describe) the weird feelings he got whenever Barry mentioned bringing someone back to the apartment in a non-platonic sense. To try and communicate the rocky, angry feeling, the heat rising like lava and the sudden urge to twist and grind and crush something, but having nothing to destroy. Another option would be to deny everything, accuse Barry of being paranoid. Len didn’t like that tactic, because he’d had it done to him in the past and it was a horrible feeling, to be made to feel unsure of one’s own perception. So he went with the last option: blatantly lie.

“Honestly, Barry, I have better things to do with my time than worry about who or what you bring home. As long as you avoid assholes and stray cats, you can do what you like. I don’t care.”

Bizarrely, rather than looking relieved, Barry looked like Len had just hit him in the face with a blunt object. He continued to blink for a few seconds, bearing an uncomfortable resemblance to a child who has just tripped and is not sure how to feel about it. 

Just as Len was starting to get worried, Barry seemed to come back to himself. An easy smile snapped back into place on his face.

“Great,” he said, and went to retrieve his toast.

Len watched him butter it, slathering the butter on so that it pooled in the middle like a scummy pond of grease, and turned the edges of the bread soggy. His stomach turned at the sight.

The first slice of toast was halfway to Barry’s mouth when Len plucked it out of his hands and tossed it across the kitchen like a frisbee. It landed neatly in the trash can.

“Hey!” Barry protested.

“Sit down,” Len said. “I’ll make you something.”

“I already made something!”

“You’re not eating that. It offends me.”

“I’m hungry!”

“Your cholesterol will thank me for it,” Len told him, and he started pulling a few ingredients from the fridge.

Barry watched him with reluctant amusement. “You know, I fed myself for several years before I met you.”

“And it’s a miracle you survived that dark time,” Len said dryly. “Now sit down and shut up.”

~*~

By the time they returned to the living room, Barry had been fed something which Len deemed to be acceptable and they had both almost completely forgotten about Sara. She was curled up watching some low-budget chat show when they returned, and Leonard felt a rush of discomfort as he realised that it had completely slipped his mind that she was sitting there. His minute had turned into forty of them, as he was once again encompassed in that bubble that he had grown so used to existing between himself and his roommate. 

Sarah turned to look at them, apparently unperturbed by their long absence. Len examined her face carefully for signs of annoyance -  a tightening of the corners of her mouth, rigidity to her shoulders, coolness in her expression - but he came up blank.    
  


"Trouble in paradise?" she asked.   
  
"Nope," Len said.    
  
"I'm sorry about that, I didn't mean to keep him talking for that long," Barry said. "That was very rude of me. In my defence, I have had a really bad day."    
  
Sara patted the sofa beside her. "Come and tell me all about it," she said warmly.    
  
"It's a very long story," warned Barry.    
  
"I've got plenty of time." She looked around the room. "You got a deck of cards, Leonard?"    
  
"I probably have a deck or two lying around somewhere." He might even manage to find a deck that wasn't loaded if he looked hard enough.    
  
"Well I've got some bourbon," she said, fishing a bottle out of her purse. "We'll have ourselves a little party."    
  
Within twenty minutes or so they had a game of poker in full swing and Len was losing to both of them. Perhaps he should have used a loaded deck after all. If it had been Mick playing then Len would have known he was cheating, but he suspected that Barry and Sara were beating him entirely under their own steam. Barry had taken Len completely by surprise in that he was a little card sharp, taking him to the cleaners with no discernible effort. Len had been almost certain that Barry would only know how to play Go Fish, maybe Snap if they were lucky. It had been a big enough shock to discover that Barry could play poker at all; to find out that he could play well was astonishing.

My Dad taught me how to play," Barry explained as Len sullenly admitted defeat.   
  
"Barry's dad's a cop," Len told Sara as he gathered up the cards which he'd thrown disgustedly to the table. "That's probably why he isn't cheating."    
  
"Oh, no, not Joe," Barry said. "I mean my real dad."  
  
Len went very still. Dads had never been a particular favourite subject of his either but he had noticed that Barry never talked about his real dad, and he'd never seen fit to encourage it. In fact as far as he could tell Joe and Iris were the only family on the scene and although he was admittedly curious, it wasn't in Len's nature to pry. He tried to act casual by taking a sip of his drink, but if Barry hadn't noticed his reaction then Sara certainly had. Her sharp eyes flitted between the two of them and then back down again, as if focusing on her cards.   


"He's in prison," Barry said.    


Len noticed then that he was a little... perhaps not drunk, but his speech had softened and he was a little unsteady as he shuffled his cards.   


"What'd he do?" Sara asked.   


Len cringed. Of course it was what they both wanted to know, but if anybody had asked Len that question he'd have had them up against a wall, and told them in no uncertain terms that unless they wanted to spend the next month shitting out their own teeth then they'd better retract the question. It was kind of a sensitive subject, certainly not one to broach with someone you'd only just met.   


"Oh no, he's innocent," Barry said earnestly. “He was framed.”  
  
"I'm sorry to hear that," Sara said carefully. 

She deliberately didn't look at Len, who was having difficulty not rolling his eyes. In his younger days he too had been a staunch defender of his own father, who couldn't possibly have been a criminal. Even when he punched Len and kicked Lisa and drank and smoked and god knows what else, even when he left bruises all over Len's face and arms in a drunken temper, Len still came home from school every day with  _ more _ bruises from punching any kid who called his father a crook. It had taken him a long time to come to terms with the fact that actually, his father was an even bigger scumbag than the kids at school had said he was; they didn't know the half of it. Having struggled himself with the delusion that his father was not in essence a bad guy, Len felt a certain amount of empathy for Barry - but also some disgust. Disgust that a smart, good kid like Barry could be suffering under the same delusions he had and appeared to be having nowhere near as much success at shaking them off.   


"What happened?" Sara asked gently.   


Barry put his cards down. Rather than seeming angry, he actually just seemed determined - and a little bit sad.   


"When I was a kid, my mother was murdered."   


Sara stiffened.   


"I was in my room one night," Barry said, "and I heard this noise downstairs. This weird rushing noise, like a whirlwind. I got up to see what it was." He took a deep breath. "I got downstairs and my mother was screaming. She was in the living room and she was screaming and crying. And all around her, there was this light. And in the light there was a man - a man dressed all in yellow."   


Len didn't dare look at Sara. He kept his face carefully blank.   


"The man was moving so fast I could barely see him, I only got a glimpse. And my Dad - he grabbed me and he told me to run, to get out of the house. I couldn't move - I was frozen. But he told me to get out. And the next thing I knew, I was ten blocks away."   


Barry took a sip of his drink. His hand was shaking.   


"I ran all the way back. When...when I got back to my house, the police had my dad. They wouldn't tell me what was happening. They made him get into a police car...I went into the house, and there was this white sheet. A big white sheet, like you see on TV. I pulled it back..." Barry swallowed. "And it was my mom under the sheet. And...she wouldn't wake up." He looked at them both determinedly. "Everyone said it was my dad. Everyone thinks he killed her. But I know the truth. It was the man in the yellow suit."   


Sara took his hand. Barry barely seemed to notice.   


"That's why I joined the CCPD," Barry said. "So I could find more clues. So I could find out what happened to my mom and prove that it wasn't my dad who killed her. One day I'll prove he’s innocent and I’ll bring him home.”

There was a long silence. All of a sudden, Barry looked embarrassed. He lowered his head.

“You think I’m crazy,” he said.

“I don’t,” Sara said.

He looked at her, eyes wide with hope. “You - you don’t?”

“Nope. I’ve seen some crazy shit in my time, who am I to tell you that you didn’t see what you saw? Besides, you were there, you saw what happened. If your dad killed her, you’d know.”

“That’s what I’ve always said,” Barry said eagerly. “My dad’s not like that - I’d know if he was. I’ve met murderers. You can tell. You can always tell.”

Len shifted slightly in his seat. If that was true, then Barry was being remarkably understanding about sharing a room with two murderers, especially without demanding an explanation. He knew all too well that murderers came in many shapes and sizes and you  _ couldn’t  _ always tell. 

Looking at him, Barry said quietly, “You don’t believe me.”

“You have to admit it’s kind of improbable that some guy in a bright yellow suit broke into your house and killed your mother whilst a tornado waged war on your living room,” Len pointed out.

Barry did his very best not to react but Len noticed him slumping slightly in his seat.

“I don’t know what to believe, Barry,” he admitted. “I’m finding it very hard to accept your side of the story...but I don’t know your dad and I can’t exactly turn around and say that you’re making it all up. I don’t know your dad and I wasn’t there. And a lot of crazy things happen in this world. I’ve seen some crazy shit. Who am I to turn around and say that you’re lying, or you’re wrong? I believe that you believe it. I’m sorry that’s the best I can give you.”

Looking away from him, Barry didn’t respond. Len felt a pang of shame, like he should believe such a crazy story by default merely because Barry had told it to him and Barry would never lie, Barry practically oozed sincerity to an almost painful degree and to disbelieve anything he said seemed ridiculous. In fact, all Barry had ever given him was sincerity - never holding anything back, his interests and his excitement and his social life all brimming over and spilling into their little flat until Len found that rather than annoying him, he found it comforting. Homely. To have Barry clam up and hold back on him now would disturb the equilibrium and it occurred to him that his difficulty in believing this tale might cause the kid to shrink from him. Len felt a tightening in the pit of his stomach.

Then, Barry turned back towards him and Len was astonished to find him choked up with emotion, his eyes glistening, lips pressed tightly together as if to hold back a flood. 

“Thank you,” he choked. “For keeping an open mind. Most people...they just think I’m crazy.”

“Well, you are,” Sara said. “You live with  _ him _ . You gotta be crazy to put up with that.”

Barry laughed then, seeming to take himself by surprise. He wiped his eyes, and Len hurriedly refilled all of their glasses whilst Barry composed himself, so that he wouldn’t have to look at him and try to ignore or analyse the weird feelings that had come over him at the sight of Barry’s imminent breakdown. Thank God for Sara, he thought; within a few seconds Barry appeared to be in control again, and only a bright pink patch on each cheek and his eyes being a little too bright gave away that he had ever been in tears. It was a relief. Len didn’t know how to handle emotional outbursts; he was terrible at platitudes and at hugging and whatever else you were supposed to do to cheer people up. The best he could manage was to listen, and that he did with visible discomfort. He flashed a grateful look across the table at Sara, who gave him the slightest of nods in response.

“Anybody up for another game?” she asked, lolling back in her seat. Her eyes did not leave Len’s face.

“I was born ready,” Barry said cheerfully, and he handed his cards back to Len, who might have been the worst at poker but was still the best at shuffling the deck. 

They all settled down for another game, Len with a sense of great relief, but also a little nagging itch that he was determined to ignore. 

He pretended he couldn’t see either Barry or Sara shooting looks at him every few minutes when they were supposed to be looking at their cards.

~*~

“Thank you for tonight,” Barry said. “It was nice. A decent ending to a terrible day.”

They were standing in the hallway, halfway between their respective bedrooms. Sara had left around fifteen minutes previously and the two of them had made a very half-assed attempt at cleaning up before deciding that it was far too late for that shit, and left their empty glasses and half-finished card game spread out on the living room table. In the morning their glasses would have left rings on the glass and it would be a pain to clean off but Len really couldn’t bring himself to give a shit. His eyes felt puffy and itchy with tiredness, his lips a little numb from the whiskey, and he still felt edgy, which was stupid. Barry stood languidly with his hands in his pockets, eyes slightly bloodshot and his hair raked up at odd angles. Apparently in spite of the exhaustion written across his face, he felt no compunction to call it a night just yet. Len had other ideas. He liked to get a decent amount of sleep and he also liked to rise early, not lay sweatily in bed like a slob all day, or jerk out of bed after ignoring all his alarms and end up sprinting around the flat in a wide-eyed panic (like Barry.)

Nevertheless, he did not complain. He leaned against the wall to take Barry in; he looked incredibly small in a too-big sweater and tight jeans, incredibly young, too. There were dark shadows underneath his eyes.

Len said, “High praise. Only decent?”

Barry blushed a little. “Well. I guess I kind of put a dampener on things, saying all that stuff about my dad. I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”

“I’m no stranger to daddy issues, Barry,” Len said lightly. “We’re kind of in the same boat, you and I. My dad’s in prison, too.”

Barry’s head snapped up. “Really?”

“Yep.” He popped the P, laboring to sound casual, hating himself for it. “Only unlike your dad, my old man isn’t innocent. Far from it, actually.”

“That sucks,” Barry said honestly.

It did suck. Len waited with bated breath for the platitude that always came next, without fail, the part of that conversation he hated.  _ I’m sorry.  _ It always made Len think,  _ I’m not.  _ To his astonishment, though, Barry didn’t say it. He just levelly met Len’s gaze.

He found himself saying, “Not really. Best place for him. Keeps him away from me; that’s all I care about.”

“I guess,” Barry said. “It still sucks that he...did what he did, though.”

“He did a lot of things,” Len said. “Can’t take ‘em back.” Pause. He didn’t want to say it, knew it would make things awkward, found himself saying it anyway. “Aren’t you going to tell me you’re sorry?” This, sardonically, to make sure that Barry didn't think he was asking him to.

Barry shrugged. “What good would that do?”

Len tried his very best not to look incredulous. Not for the first time, he reflected that Barry was way wiser than he looked. 

A silence fell, one borne of mutual understanding. Len found himself examining Barry’s languorous pose, the way he was leaning to easily against the doorframe with his head tilted back, neck exposed as the top of his head brushed lightly against the paintwork. He closed his eyes, lashes catching the light, his profile thrown into sharp relief by the light. Len watched with a kind of fascination as Barry swallowed, the movement of his Adam’s apple, the faintest of sounds as he completed the motion. Then, Barry’s eyes opened again and he met Len’s gaze head on.

Len felt a weird sensation in his chest - not quite a flutter, not quite a thump, but something in between. Something clumsy and sharp, a sudden squeezing. He shifted his weight warily. Barry was still looking at him, his gaze unfathomable. He looked to be committing every feature of Len’s face to memory, his attention felt heavy and a little uncomfortable. Len felt that something in the atmosphere around them had shifted and he didn’t know how to feel about it. Clearing his throat, he straightened up.

Barry relaxed then, loosening from his artfully languid pose against the doorframe which Len only just realised he’d been holding on purpose, presumably because he knew it looked good. Vain little bastard. With no small amount of effort, Len held back a snort.

“I’m going to call it a night.”

“All right,” Barry said quietly.

Neither of them moved. Len had the bizarre idea that they were waiting for something, although he had no idea what. After a moment of hovering, he decided this was stupid. He was tired.

“Goodnight, Barry.”

“‘Night, Leonard,” Barry said quietly, and the last Len saw of him that night was a momentary glimpse as he  closed his bedroom door, when the kid was still stood watching him from the same spot.


	4. Chapter 4

It was a week or so later when the trouble began anew. Barry had, remarkably, got up for work at a reasonable time and was washing up his breakfast bowl whilst Len drank his usual cup of coffee. It was actually his third; he had plans for today. More job-hunting, which was beginning to grate even more than sitting at home with nothing to do but clean. At this rate he might as well just become a full-time housekeeper.

Barry dried his bowl, put it away and popped open his briefcase to do a final check on his equipment before he left for work. Len went to put his mug on the draining board and had a quick look in the fridge.

“What do you want for dinner tonight, steak or tuna noodle casserole?”

Barry froze in the act of examining a small test tube for cracks. “Oh, uh, actually, I’m going out for dinner tonight. Jeremy and I finally managed to reschedule our date.”

Len closed the fridge and resurfaced, keeping his expression carefully blank.  _ Jeremy.  _ And he’d thought Leonard was a poncy name.  _ Jeremy.  _ Pretentious asshole.

“Fine,” he said. “What time will you be back?”

Replacing the test tube, Barry said, “Late. We’re going out for dinner to that new Chinese place near the city centre and then probably going for a couple of drinks after that. Don’t wait up.” He snapped his case shut. “What are your plans for today?”

Len shrugged. “The usual. Job-hunting with no hope of success. At this rate I’m going to have to start knocking on people’s doors like a boy scout and asking if they want their lawns mowing.”

“Hey, don’t give up,” Barry said. “You’ll get there eventually. Someone’s gonna hire you, I promise.”

That was easy enough for him to say, with his ridiculously big brain and his scientific degrees, fancy job, briefcase full of scientific equipment and god knows what else, but Len couldn’t bring himself to point out that it would be a lot harder for his own uneducated, felonious ass to get any sort of meaningful employment. Instead, he changed the subject and several minutes later Barry was heading off to work at a jog, smiling all over his face and delighted with the idea that he had cheered Len up.

Len went out and started dropping off resumes. 

He’d been out for a few hours when he decided to get a break for lunch. He was heading for some kind of fast food stall, following his nose, when he collided with a man a fair few years his senior. Wearing a long coat and looking grumpy, the man looked up from his phone and glared at him.

“Watch it,” he snapped.

“ _ You _ watch it,” Len snarled, and rammed his shoulder into the guy as he forced his way past. Asshole.

He was several blocks away by the time he realised he had the man’s wallet in his hand.

Len stopped dead. People flowed past him, overtaking him from one side while people heading his way shoved past, irritated. Surprised, he looked at the wallet, turning it over several times. Definitely not his wallet. He opened it up and found a driver's license belonging to a Mr. Ronald Pearson, born January 19th 1965; some cash, mostly petty change to his disgust, but a few bills; a few loyalty cards for various stores; a crumpled photograph of a young girl, presumably a child or grandchild; and most promisingly, a selection of credit and debit cards.

Absentmindedly, Len moved to the side of the street to get out of people’s way while he examined his spoils. Pocketing the cash, he examined the rest of the documents with a detached sort of curiosity, the way one might watch a mildly interesting television programme that hadn’t quite caught one’s attention.

He hadn’t meant to lift the guy’s wallet. Hadn’t even thought about it. It was amazing, really, what a bit of muscle memory could do. For years Len had been utilising the trick of bumping into someone and sneaking their wallet out of their pocket when they were busy being mad about it, and when he’d walked into the annoying man, apparently his fingers had dipped into the guy’s pocket without him even noticing it. It had been too easy. Shame it wasn’t more lucrative - the guy could have had the decency to carry a little more cash around with him.

Stuffing his hands into his pockets - something he did in order to appeal casual, and also to keep anyone from stealing  _ his  _ wallet - Len started walking. This close to the city centre, it didn’t take him long to find an ATM, but he waited til he was in a seedier area of town, somewhere quiet where people weren’t lining up to draw their cash out. He didn’t want an audience for this.

Pulling out the card that he was pretty certain Pearson used the most - it had the soonest expiry date and was also nearest to the front - Len inserted it into the ATM and then considered for a moment. People were predictable beasts; most people, rather than using the PIN number they were issued with, preferred to set their own. Easier to remember, but also easier to guess. Usually, people picked significant dates - anniversaries, or birthdays. Less often, it was phone numbers. But Pearson looked like a practical guy, and an unimaginative one. After some thought, Len punched in 1-9-6-5 - which was, according to his driver’s license, Pearson’s year of birth.

A few seconds later, the machine was offering him the chance to check his balance or withdraw cash. Smirking, Len drew out five hundred dollars. Not the sort of amount that would ring too many alarm bells at the bank; he didn’t want them stopping the card too early, before he could have a little more fun. He stowed the cash in the pocket of his jeans. That would pay for his share of the rent for a month.

As he headed back for the apartment, he found himself doing it a couple more times. It was so easy, and almost therapeutic; Len had been pick-pocketing from a young age. His dear old dad taught him young, when his hands were still small and slipped easily into tighter pockets. He’d lifted wallets, cigarettes, jewellery and god knows what else for his father’s approval, sliding it all out of strangers’ pockets, and he’d been damn good at it. Part of that was what had saved Lisa from having to do the same; why go through the hassle of teaching a second kid to pilfer and steal, risk getting caught, when the first one was so good at it? Len had never lost the knack. In the forty minutes it took him to walk home, he dropped off three more resumes to assholes who would never read them, stole five more wallets and a snazzy watch and was two thousand dollars better off by the time he got home. His mood well and truly lifted, he made his way up the stairs to the apartment.

Since he had the apartment to himself, he had absolutely no qualms whatsoever about laying his spoils out on the coffee table to examine them. He’d need to use the cards quickly, before the owners had them stopped; he’d drawn out a couple of hundred from each account, nothing that would break the bank. Once upon a time he would have taken every penny they had, but he was mellowing out. It was remarkable how much better he felt, like he’d just scratched an itch that he hadn’t even been aware of. 

Weeks of applying for jobs and he hadn’t made a penny, and then in an hour or so he’d dipped a few hands into a few pockets and paid for groceries, rent and plenty of extras. It wasn’t exactly the kind of result that put one off a life of crime. 

Putting all of the cards into his own wallet, he gathered up the rest to burn. The little girl’s picture had slipped out of Pearson’s wallet and Len found himself staring at it for a moment. There was something about her face that reminded him inexorably of Lisa as a little girl. That precocious, almost wise smile. 

He tore the photo in two and shoved it back into the wallet. Stupid sentimentality never got anybody anywhere. 

_ Neither did picking pockets,  _ said a voice in his head.

Len twitched irritably. Sanctimonious little voices had no place in his head. He did what he could to survive. It wasn’t like he’d  _ meant  _ to lift that guy’s wallet. He’d left the apartment with every intention of trying to make an honest living, but nobody was giving him a chance. The world didn’t do favours. You had to look out for number one.

_ You liked it, though. _

Of course he did. There was no denying it. It gave him a little tingle every time he put his hand into a stranger’s pocket, fingers brushing against their phone, their keys, their wallets. A little shiver of electricity dancing through his fingertips and up his arm. Nothing as intoxicating as the thrill he used to get from a really big job - the adrenaline from that was indescribable. He’d been picking pockets for too long to get a lot out of it any more. But it had been so long since he’d had even a glimmer of that kind of excitement - months. Of course he liked it. Missed it, even.

_ No,  _ he told himself harshly. His life had no room for missing things like that. He was aiming for normality, now. It was a pain in the ass, and it took a ridiculous amount of effort, but slowly he was building a life for himself. He and Barry, living together, proving beyond all shadow of a doubt that Len could handle the whole normal thing. And yeah, maybe he thought wistfully sometimes of fights and adrenaline and running for his life, but that was crazy and it was going to get him killed. One day he’d be too old to run fast enough, and then what? A prison cell. No visitors, no one to break him out.

It was better this way.

Len gathered up the stolen items - except the watch; that might fetch a decent price - and went into the back yard. It was a communal yard, shared with everyone in their apartment block, and it wasn’t an impressive one. A patch of grass that resembled a dirty scrubbing brush, too small and dead-looking to be called a lawn. Some concrete slabs. In the back corner was the remnants of a bonfire one of their neighbours had had, a few weeks back. The wood was still dry. 

He trekked around the yard, throwing odd bits of wood and sticks onto the heap of charred sticks. Then he pulled the heap apart, shoved the wallets into the middle and built it back up. Lighting the match, he held it out and watched it slowly burn down to the end. He couldn’t summon that same fascination he always saw in Mick’s eyes at the sight of an open flame. Dispassionately, he watched the flame flicker, the match slowly blacken as the fire ate its way down towards his fingertips.

At the last possible second before it started to burn him, he dropped the match. It took a while to catch; he didn’t have any fuel, but the wood was dry and before too long the fire was licking at the sticks, slowly devouring them. 

Len watched as the wallets burned into nothing, and for one stupid, strange moment he could have sworn he saw that little girl’s face dancing in the flames.

~*~

  
“Honey, I’m home!” Barry called as he sailed in through the front door that evening, carrying an enormous plastic bag.

He drifted in on a wave of pleasant smells and Len, who had eaten already, inhaled appreciatively, suddenly hungry again.

“Good night?” Len asked. 

He was sat on the sofa with his feet on the coffee table, reading glasses perched on the end of his nose, reading a book. It was one of his old faithful paperbacks, bloated and with a spine so cracked that the pages fanned out, accordion style. 

In spite of the fact that Barry had told him not to wait up for him, the younger man did not appear at all surprised to see Leonard still awake - they had both known, really, that Len would stay up anyway. Barry came waltzing through the living room, plastic bag swinging merrily from one arm.

“Fantastic,” he said. “The food was to die for, and there was so  _ much  _ of it, I couldn’t possibly finish it all.”

“ _ You _ couldn’t finish it?” Len said with mock incredulity. “I don’t believe it. You’re like a black hole.”

“Oh, shut up,” Barry said fondly. “Anyway, they let me take a doggy-bag, we’ll be living on leftovers for a week - I’ll just go put this in the fridge.”

His sneakers squeaked on the kitchen floor. Len absentmindedly turned another page in his book. The fridge clunked as Barry opened it, light spilling through from the darkened kitchen, and there was a very long pause.

“Leonard?” Barry called warily.

“Barry.”

“Why is our fridge full of tuna noodle casserole?”

All of a sudden, Len felt very uncomfortable. Shifting in his seat, he flipped a few pages in his book, lost his place, went rifling through to find it again, and then placed the book flat down on the table, where it slumped disconsolately, its binding too destroyed to hold it upright.

“I wasn’t sure whether you’d have to cancel your date again tonight,” he said. “I didn’t want you going hungry like last time, so I made extra.”

Barry was quiet for a long time. Len was just starting to get concerned when the kid appeared in the doorway, still holding his bag of food, and looking weirdly touched.

“You didn’t have to do that.”

“I know,” said Len.

Apparently lost for words, Barry hovered in the doorway. 

“You’re not going to cry, are you? It would have been a waste of time and ingredients for me  _ not  _ to make you some.”

“You can quit pretending to be a jerk any time, you know. It’s just me. I won’t tell anybody.”

“What are you talking about?”

“All this cool,  _ I hate everyone  _ stuff you do. You’re a big softy really. You can let it out; I’ll keep your secret.”

Len picked up his book and turned another page. “If you don’t stop talking and shut your mouth, Scarlet, you won’t be eating that tuna noodle casserole; you’ll be wearing it. See how soft I am then.”

Barry wrinkled his nose cheerfully. “You do realise you’re gonna have to help me eat all of this, right? The two of us are gonna be living on leftover tuna and Chinese food for a week.”

“Sounds just like your life before you met me.”

“Hey!”

“Go put that in the fridge, Allen, before you throw it all over the apartment.”

“Yes sir!” said Barry smartly, saluting. In doing so, he promptly hit himself in the face with the plastic bag.

Len snorted and went back to his book. Meanwhile, Barry ambled around for a while before he started trying to squeeze the doggy bag into the fridge, doubtlessly crushing a week’s worth of grocery shopping in the process.

After a lot of grunting, swearing and rustling, Barry finally closed the fridge. For a moment Len thought about going to check the damage, but he decided to save that for another time. He barely had time to look up before Barry was leaping onto the couch, getting alarmingly close to Len and tucking himself beneath the older man’s arm. Len grumbled, elbowed him, and eventually gave in and allowed Barry to rest his head on Len’s shoulder. Barry wriggled and fidgeted for a minute or so, getting comfy, and then he found a good position and settled down. His hair tickled Len’s neck. Len did his very best to be annoyed about it.

“Whatcha reading?”

“Anna Karenina,” Len said curtly.

“Really? Isn’t that a classic?”

“You sound surprised.”

“I always had you down for a thriller, murder mystery kind of guy.”

“There’s a lot you don’t know about me, Barry.”

“Yeah,” Barry mused. “I guess there is.”

“Did you know I once dismembered a man using only a copy of War and Peace? It was kind of a similar situation to this; I was reading, and he wouldn’t quit bugging me.”

He could feel Barry grinning against his neck, clearly not taking him at all seriously. Admittedly, he couldn’t even fool himself into thinking that he meant it.

“So let me guess, you bludgeoned him over the head with it?”

“Actually I sawed all his limbs off with the pages. Never underestimate the power of a paper cut.”

“Sounds time-consuming.”

“And yet so worth it.”

Barry let him read for a while, but patience was not the kid’s strong point. 

“Don’t you wanna hear about my date?”

“No,” Len said honestly, “but it sounds like you’re going to tell me anyway.”

“I don’t  _ have  _ to.”

“You’ll explode if you don’t,” Len said, and he dog-eared the page and tossed his book onto the table. “Go ahead.”

Immediately, Barry launched into a gushing explanation of Jeremy and his job and his musical taste and his hobbies and how he looked, what he was wearing, in-depth analysis of his favourite colour and about his star sign and how he wasn’t really compatible with Barry but he didn’t really believe in that crap anyway, and Len sat and did a very poor job of pretending to listen. He did not want to talk about Jeremy. As far as he was concerned, Jeremy could go fuck himself. In his mind he pictured Jeremy as Hartley 2.0, but for some reason, a blonde. Maybe with obnoxiously white teeth, like someone on a pamphlet in a dentist’s office. Either way, Len didn’t like the sound of him. Unfortunately, Barry continued extolling Jeremy’s virtues for the next forty minutes, by which point Len felt that the next person to use the word ‘Jeremy’ in his presence would be having an entire chair shoved up their ass. To avoid reaching this extreme, he gave a very loud and theatrical yawn.

Barry looked stricken. “Oh. Sorry. Am I boring you?”

“It’s kind of late,” Len reminded him, feeling that it would be unkind to say that actually, he was making Len want to rip his own ears off and eat them.

Checking the time, Barry said, “Oh. It is. You waited up for me. You didn’t have to.” He looked slyly at Len. “You don’t even have an excuse for that one.”

“Sure I do,” Len said. “Gotta make sure you get home safe. If you get mugged, who’s gonna pay your share of the rent?”

“You’re all heart, Leonard.” 

“It’s the first time I’ve heard that one. Go to sleep, Barry. You’re going to need your beauty sleep for your next date.”

“Okay,” Barry said. “Night, Len.”

Len didn’t reply. He just went and threw himself onto his bed, a stupid smirk on his face for some unfathomable reason. Clearly he wasn’t used to having someone to exchange witticisms with. Mick wasn’t really one for banter.

It was strange. He’d never really considered himself to be the sort for banter either. His quips were usually one-sided, at the expense of someone else. Some dry, sarcastic comment not intended to be countered. But he enjoyed these conversations with Barry, having someone to bounce back his insults like they were playing some strange kind of verbal table tennis. It was a little like being friends with Sara, except that their sparring was usually more physical than verbal. 

He’d never expected Barry to get under his skin like this. Not even under his skin, in fact - he was deeper than that. Maybe in his stomach - there seemed to be an awful lot of strange things floating around in there. He might have called them butterflies, but he’d always thought that metaphor was stupid. It was more like his stomach kept clenching and unclenching over and over and he couldn’t figure out why.

Or maybe Barry was in his chest, because he kept getting weird feelings there too. A strange squeezing sensation, which he might have worried about if he didn’t know that he was in good health and a heart attack was very unlikely to be imminent.

In his head, definitely. At the weirdest times, too. Some crappy pop song would come on the radio and as Len was grimacing and changing the channel, he would have a brief flash of thought that Barry had played this song the week before, or he’d heard him singing a few bars of it in the shower; he’d see a big dumb dog on the sidewalk and think that Barry would probably be running over to pat it if he was there; he’d be preparing a meal and realise he’d forgotten an ingredient and then he’d text Barry and ask him to nip to the store and get it without even considering doing it for himself. He was becoming frighteningly domesticated and the weird thing was that he kind of liked it. Like a grumpy cat that scratches the furniture and constantly complains to be let out and yet still ends up purring on its owner’s knee, Len was being tamed. And he would never let on that he was kind of starting to enjoy it.

Snorting disgustedly, Len pulled off his boots and dumped them on the floor. He was just getting sentimental now and he wasn’t having it. He didn’t go in for the mushy crap - he just  _ didn’t _ . And he had no intention of starting now. Pulling the covers over his head, he took a few deep breaths and let himself start to relax, sinking into the exhaustion that was lapping at him, trying to pull him under. He could still faintly hear Barry’s voice buzzing around his head, still monologuing about Jeremy this and Jeremy that, and he made an irritable noise and started focusing on breathing very loudly to try and drown it out. 

It was relaxing, the whole breathing thing. For the first minute or so he always felt stupid, but then he started to get into it. Just breathing in and out...in and out… The steady movement of his chest up and down, his fingers interlocked with his hands resting on his belly, feeling them rock and shift along with the rhythm of his breaths…and he was drifting away, feeling the darkness close over his head, silky waters pulling him under into the depths of unconsciousness...

He awoke with a jerk, sitting bolt upright in bed. It was as if someone had shaken him, he woke so abruptly. Confused, he put a hand to his head. Something had disturbed him, but he couldn’t think what. A bad dream, perhaps. 

Getting up, he padded into the kitchen to make himself a warm drink and was astonished to find that he’d slept in. It was almost lunchtime, meaning that although he hadn’t gone to bed until around two he’d slept for about ten hours. Weirder still was that Barry was still in bed, too. His forensics case still sat by the front door along with the shoes he’d kicked off the night before, and there was no sign of the usual carnage he left behind on his way to work. Being a proverbial whirlwind of lateness, Barry appeared incapable of leaving without making a mess and a lot of noise which meant that he must still be in bed - in which case he was  _ very  _ late. 

Len picked up the cup of hot milk he’d made and carried it out of the room as he went to knock on Barry’s door.

“Barry?”

“Uh-huh?” came a muffled voice.

“You know what time it is, right?”

“Uh, quarter to twelve.”

“Shouldn’t you be at work?”

“I’m not going to work today,” Barry said.

It sounded as though he had a pillow over his head - possibly several. Len frowned.

“Are you sick?”

“Kind of,” Barry said evasively.

“Can I come in?”

There was a pause. “I guess.”

Len opened the door to Barry’s room and stepped inside.

He’d never been in Barry’s room since they moved in, only caught vague glimpses of it whilst passing. It was tidier than he expected, and tastefully decorated in chocolate brown and cream. There were books stacked on the desk, and a large selection of DVDs on a rack by the window. Barry’s bed, like Len, was a single. And underneath the duvet, which was also brown, Barry was hunched up with his head poking out, like an animal in a den.

His hair was standing up wildly, and he had puffy eyes, his lashes spiky. His cheeks glistened wetly; it was painfully apparent that he had been crying.

Len stared at him. Crying was not something he was equipped to deal with. It had never been something his father allowed; crying was the best way to piss off his old man and he’d learned quickly that the best way to avoid having more to cry about was to avoid crying at all. His first instinct was to back off and leave, but that would have been a pretty shitty thing to do, so he did the only other thing he could think of and offered Barry his mug of warm milk.

Gratefully, Barry reached out from underneath the duvet and took it, cupping it with his hands. His nails were gnawed down to little stubs; Len was pretty sure they hadn’t looked like that last night. Shifting his weight a little, he hesitated and then sat gingerly down on the edge of the bed.

Barry took a sip of the milk. Len could imagine how it would trickle through him, warming him, how the heat of it in his hands would be pleasant. It wasn’t too hot to be uncomfortable, just a cosy sort of temperature. 

“Thanks,” Barry said after a few minutes of peaceful quiet. The milk was around half gone at this point and he had a little bit of a milk moustache. Len decided not to point it out.

“You sick or something?” Len asked.

“Today…” Barry’s voice cracked and he had to clear his throat a couple of times. “It’s the anniversary. Of the day my mom died. I forgot about it last night, and when I woke up…” He swallowed, gripped the mug harder. “Let’s just say I’m not really in the mood for work today.”

“That’s horrible,” Len said honestly.

“It just hits me sometimes, you know? Like I miss her. Of course I miss her, I always miss her - and then it’s times like today when I think that I’ve lived longer without her than I did with her and I forgot that it was today that she died. I can’t remember what she looks like, sometimes. I can’t remember the sound of her voice. When I imagine it she just sounds like my dad, telling me about her. I forgot my own mom, Leonard. And I hate it.”

Barry sank down further into the duvet; it rose up around his head, making him look very small. Almost childlike, in fact; a little boy hiding from something he didn’t want to face. He raised the mug a little higher to cover part of his face.

Len put a hand on the top of the mug and gently pushed it down so that he could look at him. Barry looked back for a split-second before he looked down again, staring into the mug.

“Tell me about her.”

“What?”

“I bet you remember more than you think you do. So go on. Tell me about her.”

“Like what?”

“Anything you can think of. Good or bad, it doesn’t matter.”

Barry’s forehead wrinkled. “...She used to carry a red handbag. I remember that. It was my favourite colour. It never worked with any of her outfits, but she carried it anyway.”

“Okay,” Len said. “What else?”

“She was a crier. Anything emotional and she would cry - books, movies, even sad music or infomercials. Everything made her cry. My dad used to tease her about it.”

“Good,” said Len. “Anything else?”

Barry hesitated. “She used to read me this book. It was called  _ The Runaway Dinosaur.  _ We both loved that book - sometimes I think she liked it better than I did.” He laughed. “We always used to read it - whenever I got sick especially, she’d read it to me. When I got older I used to complain about it, I said it was for babies, but I never meant it really. And if I got ill I used to let her get it out and she would read to me, and it was really nice.”

Len realised then that he was staring, and also that he had just been caught. Confused, Barry stared right back, still holding onto the mug with both hands. Opening his mouth, Len attempted to speak but he had no idea what to say and his throat was painfully dry. He swallowed. 

One of Barry’s hands moved, releasing the mug. He let it fall, so that his fingers were hanging out from underneath the duvet, an inch or so from Len’s hands. There was a tingling in his fingertips, and a weird itch underneath his skin - an urge to do something, to act, but he wasn’t sure what he would do if he did. He was out of his depth - scratch that; he was already drowning. 

Just as Len’s hand twitched, Barry moved. He leaned over to put the almost-empty mug of hot milk on his desk and Len flexed his fingers, trying to make out that he’d just had cramp. He didn’t know what to make of that weird spasm. If Barry hadn’t moved just when he did, Len would have ended up touching his hand. Thank God the kid was a fidget; Len had no idea what the hell he would have done next, or even where the urge had come from. He wasn’t exactly a touchy-feely guy. 

Drawing his knees up to his chest, Barry rested his chin on them, apparently none the wiser as to the absurd crisis Len had just been having.

“I, uh, I usually go and visit my dad. It’s a hard time for us. Him especially, he lost a lot that day.”

“Understandable,” said Len, thinking,  _ So did you. _

Barry looked up. “I was wondering if you’d come with me.”

Bewilderment was written right across Len’s face; he knew it. Barry flushed.

“I - sorry, you don’t have to. That was stupid, forget I said it.”

“Why would you want me to come with you?” Len asked slowly.

Barry hesitated. “I’ve told him a lot about you. He’d like to meet you. And…” He looked away. “I don’t really want to be alone right now.”

Well that hit Len below the belt.  _ Way  _ below the belt. He melted like ice cream in the sun, feeling every inch of coldness he’d ever mustered going up in smoke. Barry was hunched forlornly on the bed, clearly embarrassed; his cheeks were growing steadily pinker, and he didn’t seem to want to make eye-contact any more. Len kind of wanted to shove him, and if it had been Mick or Sara he probably would have. He’d have made some disparaging comment about being a wuss a few seconds later, and expected them to pull themselves together. But Barry was different, and Len didn’t think he’d respond well to being shoved and told to man up. Nor did he deserve it. Today was bound to be a rough day and Len didn’t want to make it any worse.

“Sure, kid,” he said. “I’ll come with you.”

Barry stared at him. “Really?”

“Why not? It’s not like I’ve got anything better to do.”

The kid’s face lit up. You’d have thought Len had offered him a winning lottery ticket from the look on his face.

“You really mean it? Thank you!”

Barry lunged across the bed and hugged him. Len was so startled that he didn’t respond for a moment; he sat stiffly with his hands in the air, palms up as if he were being held at gunpoint. Apparently, Barry didn’t notice. He clung to Leonard like a finger monkey, and after a moment or two Len lowered his arms and gingerly patted him on the back.

“You’re the best,” Barry said fondly, his face buried in Len’s chest.

“You’re very touchy,” Len said, becoming painfully aware of a warm fuzzy feeling spreading in his chest. 

“Sorry. Does it make you uncomfortable?”

“Very.”

“Right. Sorry.” Releasing him, Barry sat back. He was grinning like a maniac. “I’m sorry, I just never thought you’d say yes. I don’t even know why I asked, really. Thank you.”

“Yeah, well, don’t get used to it.”

“Yes sir, Mr. Grinch.”

Len narrowed his eyes. “Don’t push your luck, Barry.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Barry said, and he gave a smile that made Len feel very strange all of a sudden, so that he had to give a very quick smile in return and then look away before Barry saw that it didn’t quite meet his eyes.

~*~

The euphoria caused by Len agreeing to accompany him did not last for very long, and soon Barry was subdued again, bundled up in some unusually unflattering clothing as they headed for Iron Heights. He wore a baggy woollen sweater with unravelling cuffs, some converse which looked to be falling to bits, and a pair of jeans which weren’t in a much better state. Barry shuffled quietly at Len’s side whilst the latter did his very best not to keep looking at him, because he didn’t want to make Barry feel worse - but the kid looked like crap, really. Even the outfit, which would have looked at home in a dumpster, couldn’t make Barry look  _ bad _ , but he looked so dejected that Len felt gloomy just looking at him. The usual light was gone from his eyes, he had dark shadows underneath them, and he kept his gloved hands shoved into his pockets when usually they would have been gesticulating wildly in accompaniment with the incessant stream of conversation coming out of his mouth. It was disconcerting to walk with Barry and have him be quiet; it did not bode well.

They must have looked bizarre together, because for his part, Len was wearing a pair of enormous sunglasses and had the hood of his parka pulled right up and pulled tightly around his face, in order to obscure as much of him as possible. He had done a brief stint in Iron Heights and left considerably sooner than he should have, and not exactly legally either. As soon as Barry mentioned which prison his Dad was in, Len knew he should drop out; he was risking a hell of a lot by walking in there and if he just went swanning in he could well find himself incapable of swanning out again - but he couldn’t face the prospect of telling Barry he’d changed his mind and seeing the look on the kid’s face, so he’d made do by swaddling his entire head in the hood and rooting out the sunglasses. It was a poor disguise. It was also not the weather for sunglasses; it was a dismal day in late August and he looked like a complete imbecile, but luckily Barry was too out of sorts to call him out on it.

As they walked up the approach road to Iron Heights, Len fought to maintain an affectation of nonchalance even though he felt like there were centipedes in his stomach. He was Daniel walking into the lion’s den. He was sticking his head right into the lion’s mouth, as far down its throat as he could get. Underneath the parka, he was sweating a little. It suddenly occurred to him that if things went wrong and he got himself arrested and put away, that would make Barry’s day ten times worse. 

However, Leonard was many things but he was not a quitter, and he’d pulled off heists way more daring than this, so he squared his shoulders and kept walking. 

He got a few funny looks as he walked in, and one of the guards eyed him suspiciously as he entered the visiting area, but when the guy saw Barry at his side he seemed to relax. Apparently Barry was a regular, and merely by association Len was being let off the hook. 

The two of them went to sit in one of the little booths, and Barry managed a fairly decent approximation of a smile as he picked up one of the little black phones and held it to his ear. On the other side of the glass, Barry’s old man was already grinning, with little lines fanning out around his eyes. He was a kindly looking guy with a fair few wrinkles and warm eyes and the complete polar opposite of Len’s dad, who had always kind of reminded him of a shark.

Apprehensively, Len picked up the other phone and held it up against the hood of his parka. He couldn’t hear much - but he wasn’t here for a chat, he reminded himself, he was here for moral support. It felt incredibly surreal to be on this side of the glass. He hadn’t spent much time on the other side either, never had many visitors when he was inside, but it was still jarring to be seeing things from this perspective.

“Hey, slugger,” Barry’s dad said cheerfully. A little too cheerfully, truth be told. “How’re you holding up?”

“I’m okay,” Barry said, which was clearly a lie because he still looked like crap. “You?”

“Oh, same old, same old. It’s always a rough day, today. Who’s your friend?”

“This is Leonard,” Barry said, looking across at Len. “My roommate. I told you about him.”

Uncomfortably, Len held up a hand. It couldn’t even be called a wave, that movement he made. It was the kind of movement you made to thank someone whilst driving, or to bid farewell to someone you were glad to be getting rid of.

“You sure did,” Barry’s dad said. “Nice to meet you, Leonard. I’d shake your hand, but…” He shrugged.

“Don’t worry about it,” Len said.

“You taking care of my boy?”

“ _ Dad _ ,” Barry protested.

A crinkly grin unfurled across the older man’s face and Len couldn’t help but smirk back. He’d never seen Barry act like this - the kid embarrassed by his old man, and it was sweet.

“I do my best,” Len said. “He doesn’t exactly stay out of trouble.”

“Don’t I know it,” Henry said. “But you look like you can handle him.” He looked across at Barry. “Do I recall you saying you’d met someone?” His eyes darted across to Len and away again in a split second. Presumably Barry’s dad had a similar opinion to Len’s when it came to Barry’s taste in men.

It was a slightly bizarre subject change, Len thought - but hey, the guy was here to talk to his son, not the weirdo roommate dressed for Arctic weather. Made things easier for him, anyhow. He leaned back in his seat a little.

“Oh, uh, yeah,” said Barry. “His name’s Jeremy. He’s a doctor. You’d like him.”

“I’m sure I would. But ah, you might like to remind him that your dad’s in jail, that way he knows that if he doesn’t treat you right, there’ll be someone coming round to kick his ass.”

“Don’t worry, I already have that covered,” Len said. “He wouldn’t be the first asshole I’ve kicked out of our apartment.”

A grin spread across Henry’s face. “Oh, I like him.”

“You would,” grumbled Barry. “You’re like peas in a pod.” But he shot Leonard a small smile and Len gave one back.

For what Len had expected to be a horrendous ordeal, the visit was over remarkably quickly. Barry sure could talk, and his dad sure could listen, so they made a good team. For his part, Len made an occasional snarky remark but for the most part he left them to it. By the time they were getting ready to leave, Barry was almost back to his usual buoyant self. He practically bounced down the road whilst Len brought up the rear, reluctantly amused by Barry’s antics.

“You might wanna calm down there, Scarlet, you keep bouncing like that and you’re gonna do yourself an injury.”

“You know, you probably shouldn’t keep calling me Scarlet when I’m not even wearing red today.”

“If you think I’m ever going to let you live down that apron then you’re sorely mistaken.” 

They were a reasonable distance from the prison now - far enough that Len dared to lose the hood, which had become uncomfortably hot around his ears. Cool air drifted past and he closed his eyes appreciatively, breathing it in. He left the sunglasses on, though. 

Len glanced over at Barry. The kid had this little smile on his face, and although he still didn’t look himself, he definitely looked better. The wind was playing with his hair, and it had brought some colour to his face other than that mottled reddish colour brought about by crying.

“You seem better.”

Barry shrugged. “I feel better now I’ve seen my dad. It doesn’t get any easier, him being inside - but days like today… I guess I feel kind of lucky. Sure, it sucks that he’s locked up, but he’s still alive. He’s still okay.”

Having a parent in prison was not what Len would categorise as lucky - unless they were an asshole, like his own father, and Henry didn’t seem like one - but he guessed when one parent had been murdered right in front of you, you took what you could get.

“He likes you,” Barry said.

“Now I know where you get your bad taste.”

Barry pouted. “I have great taste. There’s nothing wrong with my dad’s taste, either. You’re a good guy, Leonard.”

Len was sorely tempted to laugh, but he managed to quell the urge.

“Whatever you say, kid.”

“I mean it. You came with me today. You didn’t have to do that - and I know it made you pretty uncomfortable. But you did it anyway.”

“Yeah, well I’ll be calling in a few favours down the line. Don’t get too comfortable - one day you’ll curse the day you asked me to come with you.”

Barry rolled his eyes. “When are you ever going to admit that you’re not a bad guy?”

Len pretended to think for a second. “Hmm. I don’t know. Maybe when pigs fly? When pineapples start growing on the moon? When you stop wearing that dorky apron?”

“When was the last time I wore that apron?”

“It features heavily in my nightmares,” Len said dryly. “Listen, Scarlet, it’s no big deal. I came with you today because you needed someone and as much as I hate to admit it, I’m not a total asshole.”

They had stopped walking. Barry was looking at him like he’d hung the moon, his mouth hanging open a little, eyes shining. It made Len feel inexplicably guilty - like he was lying. For once, he wasn’t. As little as he had wanted to spend his day visiting Barry’s dad in prison, there had never been a question of refusing. The kid needed someone. Leonard was someone. He might have been a pretty shitty someone, but he fit the criteria.

“Besides,” he said, “if you take too many sick days then you’ll start falling behind on the rent, so it’s in my best interests to make sure you keep it together. If that means being your babysitter when you visit your dear old Daddy, so be it.”

Barry snorted, a huge grin spreading across his face. “You had to ruin it. And there was me thinking you were gonna go a whole five minutes without being an asshole.”

“It was a near miss. You’d better not tell anyone how close I got; I have a reputation to consider.”

“My lips are sealed,” Barry said, still grinning. “Come on, Grouchy, let’s go home.”

Len gave him a punch on the arm for the grouchy part, but not like the kind of punch he would give Sara or Mick if they sassed him - this was a far more toned down version. Quite frankly, Barry looked like one good punch would put him on his ass and he probably bruised like a peach to boot. Barry hit him back and Len suspected that he actually put a little bit of force behind it - only inasmuch as puppies put force into their bites when they play-fight, but even so, it was laughable. He barely felt it. Bless.

“Don’t injure yourself.”

“If you shut up right now then I’ll cook tonight, and I won’t even use the microwave.”

“That’ll be the day. Come on then, I want to witness this miracle. Let’s go.”

They ended up walking side by side, with Barry’s arm looped through Len’s and his head resting on Len’s shoulder. Astonishingly, Len didn’t mind.


	5. Chapter 5

Len came home one evening and found another stranger on his couch, and he didn’t like it any better than he had the first time.

On this occasion, both Barry and his guest were fully clothed. They were curled up on the couch watching some movie or other, Barry’s head resting comfortably on the guy’s chest. Len felt that familiar creeping anger start to rise and had to take a very deep breath. The other guy - Jeremy, presumably - had sandy blonde hair, kind of curly, and a very pleasant resting expression.

Len kicked the front door shut in order to announce his arrival. They both looked up; the newcomer startled, but Barry already beaming.

“Leonard! You’re home!”

It took a tremendous amount of effort to paste on a smile rather than saying something unpleasant, but he managed it, and hopefully it even looked sort of convincing. He wasn’t going to count on that, though.

“Jeremy, this is Leonard. Len - Jeremy.”

Jeremy practically leapt off the sofa to shake Len’s hand, like a particularly eager labrador. He had a good handshake, too. Robust. And it wasn’t that he was overcompensating, trying to crush Len’s fingers - it was just a firm shake. Smarmy bastard probably practiced it on his parents. Len released him as soon as he could and fought the urge to wipe his hand on his shirt.

“I’ve heard so much about you,” Jeremy said.

“I dread to think.”

“Oh no - all good things!”

Christ, he was so _earnest._ And he’d thought that Barry overdid the good little boy-scout thing. This guy practically oozed charm, like a particularly social slug. It wasn’t pleasant.

Jeremy hovered for a moment, clearly waiting for Len to say something. When no response was forthcoming, he plopped back down onto the sofa and underneath Barry’s arm. Len clenched his teeth.

“You want something to eat?” Barry asked. “There’s some leftovers in the fridge. Jeremy makes a mean lasagne.”

A modest shrug from Jeremy only added to the mounting urge to punch him in the face. “No thanks,” Len said curtly. “I already ate.” He half-expected his stomach to growl and give away the lie, which was probably obvious enough already, but it stayed quiet.

“Some other time, then,” Jeremy said cheerfully.

“Sure,” Len said, clearly not meaning it.

An awkward silence fell. Barry’s arm had become rather tense around Jeremy’s shoulders.

“Why don’t you join us?” Jeremy asked.

Len had to give it to the guy; he was making an effort. His first instinct was to decline and leave as soon as possible, but something made him stiffly take a seat in one of the armchairs. Maybe it was some sick kind of masochism. Maybe it was the pleading look on Barry’s face. Whatever it was, he wished it had left well alone; he and Barry barely used these armchairs, preferring to loll around on one of the sofas, and as a result the chairs were about as welcoming as the ones in a furniture display store which were still covered in plastic wrap. Len seized the arms of the chair and attempted another smile, which came out all wrong.

“So, uh, what was that you were saying about that patient in the ER?” Barry asked.

“ _Oh_ ,” Jeremy said, and immediately launched into a long-winded story about some kid who had been running amok in the hospital where he worked.

If anyone else had been telling it, the story would have been tolerable - maybe even funny. As it was, Len’s growing dislike of the man predisposed him to hate the story and wait with gritted teeth until it was over. Barry, on the other hand, was way too into it. He laughed a little too loudly, smiled a little too much. Clearly he was trying to make up for the fact that Leonard was barely even pretending to listen.

“So what do you do, Leonard?” asked Jeremy once his story had finally come to an end.

“I don’t.”

“Leonard is between jobs at the moment,” Barry said hastily. “He’s looking - but you know how it is.”

“Oh, for sure,” Jeremy agreed. “It’s so hard at the moment, so many people and not enough jobs, and it can be impossible to find what employers are looking for. I’m very fortunate to be where I am today - actually I have this friend - ”

He was off again, telling another story. Barry must be a magnet for people who loved the sound of their own voice, Len reflected.

The infuriating thing was that Len knew he was being an asshole. Jeremy might be way too eager to please, but he was a nice enough guy and he was certainly making an effort - and Len was hardly making it easy for him. They might have nothing at all in common, and Len knew that Mick would have hated him on principle, but he could probably get on with the guy if he put a little bit of work in. It wouldn’t even have to be sincere - the most fleeting of responses seemed to be enough; Jeremy carried himself along on a torrent of constant conversation and he wouldn’t need much prompting to carry on.

The trouble was that Leonard hated him.

It was a deep and visceral hatred and he had no idea what was causing it. The guy had been nothing but nice to him. Even so, Leonard wanted to punch him, to throw him out of the house and make sure he never darkened their doorstep again. The knowledge that he was being completely unreasonable only made him more angry.

Eventually, Jeremy ran out of things to say and closed his mouth. Barry, still with an arm around him like an awkward teenager at the cinema, was giving Len disapproving looks across the room. He felt like a sullen teen at the family dinner party and all of a sudden he was on his feet, glaring back at Barry with a look that could melt steel.

“Excuse me for a moment,” he said coolly, and he got up and walked into the kitchen.

He closed the door behind him and leaned against it, shaking. His temper was not something that had ever been particularly well-controlled but he usually had some idea what was causing it and this time all he had to go on was this influx of rage that appeared to be cropping up increasingly often. He wanted to hit something. This was an urge that he had experienced often in his teens but as an adult he liked to think that he had a little more restraint, and the landlord would not appreciate a fist-shaped hole in the kitchen door.

Leaning against the door, he tried to focus on calming down and that was when he heard the low but unmistakable buzz of conversation from next door. Quietly, he eased the door open just enough to be able to make out what they were saying.

“He seems nice,” Jeremy said. For such an earnest guy, he certainly knew how to utilise sarcasm.

“I’m sorry,” Barry said.

“He’s nothing like you described him. What was it you said? ‘Great guy, wicked sense of humour, really kind?’ That doesn’t quite sum up that guy. He was kind of an asshole.”

So Jeremy wasn’t quite as disgustingly pleasant as he appeared on the outside. Apparently he was more than capable of an uncharitable thought or two, just disinclined to voice them out loud. Len wasn’t sure if that made him like the guy more or less.

He could hear someone fidgeting, the sofa cushions rustling. Almost certainly Barry. “Leonard can be...difficult,” Barry said evasively.

_Difficult_ , huh? His anger, which had been slightly mollified by hearing Jeremy list all the nice things Barry had said about him, flared up again. Difficult. Like a spoilt teenager or a senile pensioner. Well, he’d show them difficult.

He threw the kitchen door open and stormed over to the front door. Luckily, he hadn’t taken his boots off - or even his jacket. No need to waste time, then. The two guys on the couch stared at him.

“I’m going out,” he said.

“Len - ”

“Don’t wait up,” he snapped, and slammed the door as he left. It felt good, even if it did little to disprove the portrayal of him as a surly teenage brat.

It was a chilly evening, and the autumn wind caught his breath and misted it in the air, so that it came in frosty puffs. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and kept walking. The cold actually helped. He’d always preferred to be cool than warm, and so much of anger was to do with being too hot, feeling it all boil over. Out here in the cold, he felt it quickly simmer down to a far more manageable level.

Hands in his pockets, he walked through the park, trees waving their branches over his head. There were still leaves on the trees but there soon wouldn’t be; he was already crunching with every step as he trod on the ones which had already fallen. Night was falling and the black shadows of the trees stood starkly out against the darkening sky, like fingers pointing upwards into the clouds. For a moment, he stood and looked up. The stars were beginning to emerge. It was hard to stay pissed on a beautiful night like tonight.

The city was growing quiet, only the occasional whoosh of a car from far away, and the faraway lights of the apartment blocks and stores still open. It made him feel alone in the world. That was a strangely peaceful thought. Like he could just keep wandering into nothing and never meet another living soul.

Unfortunately this illusion was soon shattered by a cyclist in an obnoxious fluorescent vest, who almost mowed him down as they cycled past. A few minutes after that, a woman with a yappy dog approached him and Len had to avoid looking at either of them in case the dog got any ideas and came for a fuss. Not that he minded dogs - but dogs had owners, and he minded them all right.

By the time he made his way back to the apartment, it was almost too dark to see the face of his watch. He’d hoped that Barry would have heeded his words and gone to bed, but there was still a strip of light showing from beneath their front door. He put his key in the lock and found that the kid hadn’t even locked up. Jaw set, he walked in.

Barry was sat on the sofa, alone, with his arms folded. He met Len’s gaze head on as he came in.

“Where’ve you been?”

“I went for a walk,” Len said coldly. “That okay with you?”

“What’s your problem?” Barry demanded, getting up so that he could look Len in the face.

“I could ask you the same thing.”

“I mean it! You’ve been an asshole tonight. I’ve been telling Jeremy about you for weeks, telling him what a great guy you are and how awesome you are to live with, and then you come in here acting like a dick.”

“Well you probably shouldn’t have give him such unrealistic expectations,” Len said snippily as he unfastened his coat.

“This isn’t funny!” Barry shouted. “I’m trying to understand what the hell your issue is, and I just can’t! You and I get on great, but as soon as I bring somebody home you turn into an asshole. You say you don’t have a problem with it, but I’m assuming there must be some reason why you don’t want me to have a life.”

Len looked at him scathingly. “I’ve told you before, Barry, what you do is none of my business.”

“You’re my roommate. You’re my friend. If I bring people home, I want them to get to know you, I want us all to get along. Jeremy - he’s a really nice guy. And you were horrible to him. After you left, I didn’t know what to say to him, you _ruined_ our evening.”

Len felt a grim rush of satisfaction at that and couldn’t bring himself to feel bad about it.

“I don’t get it, do you take pleasure in being a complete asshole?”

“As a matter of fact, yes,” Len said.

Barry was turning very red. “Is this all a joke to you? What is it, you’re jealous because you don’t have anybody to bring home, is that it? Because you can’t take that out on me.”

“Fuck you,” Leonard said calmly.

“Yeah? Well fuck you!”

Clearly this conversation was going nowhere. It was late, and Len had better things to do with his evening than stand exchanging insults with his roommate. In fact, if things escalated too far, he might not even _be_ Barry’s roommate for much longer. They were just riling each other up and it was solving nothing. Len zipped up his coat again and got out his keys. He’d been planning to lock up but as it turned out that would have just been a waste of time. He turned to leave.

“What are you doing?” Barry demanded.

“I’m going out.”

“You just got back!”

“Well I’m going out again.”

“It’s 3am!”

“It’s a free country!”

Len slammed the door before Barry could say anything else and he was at the ground floor before he even had time to think about it. The kid didn’t follow him. Good.

He couldn’t go back tonight, anyhow. In this sort of mood, he wouldn’t put it past Barry to wait up for him yet again and start yelling at him no matter how late it got, and then the neighbours would be on their backs as well. Besides which, he was mad as hell and he didn’t want to pick any more fights. All he wanted to do was go to sleep and put the whole mess behind him, and that was how he found himself waiting outside Sara’s apartment with his finger on the buzzer.

She opened the door wearing an enormous black t-shirt and a groggy expression. “Leonard.”

“Can I sleep on your sofa?”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “Something wrong with your bed?”

“Barry and I had a fight. I need some place to stay that’s far away from his skinny ass.”

“You ever think about bothering Mick? His couch not as good as mine?”

“If Mick heard that I had a fight with my roommate, you really think for one second that he wouldn’t be round there right now setting Barry’s bedsheets on fire?”

Sara pursed her lips, but after a moment’s consideration she backed away from the door and let him in. Gratefully, Len entered and took his boots off, because she was picky about that kind of thing. Sara’s apartment was pleasantly minimalist - furnished with what the lease came with and very little else. Her sofa was leather and didn’t look particularly comfy, but he’d take what he could get.

She emerged from her bedroom carrying a pillow and a duvet, which she thrust at him. “Get some sleep. I want details in the morning. Don’t go anywhere.”

Len rolled his eyes at her, threw the pillow down onto the sofa and took his parka off. Without further ado, Sara went back to bed, her door closing with a decisive click.

“What, no offer of cookies and warm milk?” he muttered.

“I heard that. Turn up at a reasonable hour if you want a sleepover, Leonard. I’m tired.”

Well, that was fair enough. In all fairness, he wasn’t much in the mood to sit around and chat about his disaster of an evening right now.

He found a disposable toothbrush and some mouthwash in Sara’s bathroom, along with several pairs of underwear strewn across the floor. A couple of minutes later he was on the sofa, trying to get used to Sara’s pillow (which was far more squashy than what he was used to) and breathing in the unfamiliar smell of her washing powder. In an attempt to get more comfy he had unbuttoned his jeans and taken his socks off but it just felt weirder to be in such a state of undress in a strange apartment. Sara’s place was eerily quiet - it didn’t feel particularly lived in. She hadn’t put any roots down here - no family photos, very few personal effects. No changes to the decor. He could hear his own breathing and it sounded obnoxiously loud. Back in his apartment, you could hear traffic rushing by every now and then, pipes creaking, Barry’s bedsprings shifting, one of them getting up for a glass of water and not quite turning the tap off properly so that the faucet dripped. The steady beat of the water hitting the stainless steel of the sink which he found absurdly soothing. Not this disconcerting silence. Earlier in the evening, being alone had felt like the best feeling in the world. Now? Not so much.

He was barely aware of making the decision to move, but before he knew it he had thrown himself onto the unoccupied side of Sara’s bed with a huff, bunching the duvet up on top of himself. Punching the pillow into a lump, he gave Sara a quick glance. Her hair was spread out across the pillow, and for a moment he thought she was asleep already - but then she twitched irritably.

“You mind?” Len asked.

“No, but if you kick me in the night you’re gonna wake up minus a foot. Go to sleep.”

Smirking, Len rolled over and closed his eyes. He could hear her breathing, with a slight snuffle. The duvet made a whispering sound as it shifted in time with her breathing. A clock on the wall provided a rhythmic ticking similar to the sound of the tap that he knew logically he should get fixed - but he was used to it by now.  
  
Comforted, he slipped into sleep like one might slip into an old dressing gown, with a sigh of relief.

~*~

One thing he and Sara had in common was an inability to function in the morning without coffee and so the two of them sat at her kitchen table with puffy eyes, getting their caffeine fix in companionable silence. Len switched his phone back on and found that he had a missed call and three texts from Barry. He didn’t open them. Calmly, he locked his phone again and placed it on the table so he wouldn’t be tempted. 

“So,” Sara said, drizzling syrup into a pot of yoghurt. Len grimaced; the idea of eating something so sweet first thing in the morning made his stomach turn. “What happened?”

Leonard was a man of few words and it did not take him long to explain the situation. As he did so, Sara impassively stirred her yoghurt and listened. 

“Okay,” she said when he was done. “So?”

“So what?”

“So why are you being a jerk?”

“I don’t know,” he said slowly, because she didn’t seem to be getting the point.

“You must have some idea. You don’t just go around being an asshole for no reason.”

He raised his eyebrows at her.

“Okay, so you do - but not to Barry. So what is it? Spit it out.”

Len hesitated. It occurred to him that honesty could be about to lose him a very good friend - but what choice did he have?

“Maybe I’m just a homophobe.”

Sara actually snorted. “ _ You _ ?”

“Yes, me,” he said irritably. “I don’t give a shit when he brings women over, so what else could it be?”

“You think you’re a homophobe. Leonard. How long have we been friends?”

“A good while.”

“I am very gay, Leonard. I’m a big ol’ bisexual. You know this. Do you really think we’d still be friends if I had even the slightest suspicion in my mind that you were homophobic?”

“Maybe it’s a recent development,” he said curtly.

Rolling her eyes, Sara put the yoghurt pot down on the table. “Fine. We’ll put it to the test.”

“Excuse me?”

“Look me in the face.”

Leonard sighed, but did as he was told.

“Tits,” Sara said solemnly.

He raised his eyebrows.

“I like breasts. I love women. All women. They just get me going, you know? Boobs, and asses, and just...girls. I really fucking love women. I want to date the shit out of them. One day, I’m gonna find me a really gorgeous lady and I’m going to sit on her face. Or she’ll sit on mine. On Valentine’s Day I’m going to buy this a massive dildo and fuck her with it. Leonard.  _ I like vagina _ .” 

She sat back in her seat. Len looked back at her, distinctly unimpressed.

“How do you feel?”

“I feel like I now know more about your sex life than I would ever have deemed necessary.”

“Yeeees, but do you feel angry? Disgusted? Do you feel like punching all these hypothetical women in the face? Do you feel anything even remotely similar to the way you feel when you see some strange guy on the couch with Barry Allen?”

Len thought very hard about it. He even looked back on memories of nights out with Mick and Sara, when he’d started talking to a woman with the intention of chatting her up and then ended up being the wingman as she went home with Sara instead. In fact, he had watched Sara on the dance-floor, grinding with women and kissing women and buying drinks for women and had never been remotely bothered by it - unlike Mick, who probably enjoyed it more than he should have. (Sara caught him ogling once and decked him in the face. Ever since then, Mick had kind of lost his taste for perving on women who liked women.)

Closing his eyes, he tried to look back on some of his (albeit fuzzy) memories of Sara with women and he could not remember a single occasion when he had been any more affected by the sight than he had by the sight of seeing her with some guy. Then, he thought about Barry cuddling chastely on the couch with Jeremy and it was like being punched in the stomach.

“Well?” Sara asked.

“Maybe it’s because he’s a guy. Maybe I’m a  _ sexist  _ homophobe.”

“That would mean you got off on the sight of me making out with another woman, and if I thought you were tagging along because you wanted to watch me get laid, I’d beat your ass even faster than I beat Mick’s when I caught him doing it.” She leaned forwards, interlocking her fingers. “Leonard. You’re not a homophobe. There’s got to be some other reason.”

“Well why don’t you tell me what it is, if you’re so smart?” Leonard asked irritably.

She looked thoughtful. “Describe it to me again. That feeling you get.”

Like he could put it into words. That bubbling, churning feeling, the heat in his face and stomach, the furious urge to hit something, combined with the sensation that something had hit  _ him _ . It was all a mix of fury, irritation and to top it off, that horribly disconcerting feeling when you realise you’ve left the stove on, or when you miss a step going down the stairs. The unpleasant lurch just before you lose your footing and fall. 

Len was not an eloquent man but he did his best and he was about halfway through his explanation when Sara suddenly made a noise in the back of her throat and lolled back in her chair, like it had all come together. For some reason, this pissed him off. He ground his teeth as he rounded off the description as quickly as possible.

There was a momentary pause as Sara picked up her yoghurt. Then, “You’re an idiot.”

“Excuse me?”

“You’re a total idiot,” she repeated. “You really wanna describe it to me like that and then tell me you don’t know what’s going on?”

“Enlighten me.”

Scowling across the table, he waited. Sara took a very slow spoonful of her yoghurt, looking at him thoughtfully.

“No,” she said. “I don’t think I will.”

Outraged, Leonard stared at her. “Excuse me?” he repeated.

“Trust me when I say that this is something you should figure out for yourself.” She got up and started running water into the washing up bowl. “Have you spoken to your sister lately?”

“Don’t change the subject.”

“I’m not. Have you spoken to her?”

“No,” Len said begrudgingly. Last he’d heard, Lisa had been waltzing around with some asshole boyfriend Len had already threatened on numerous occasions, and he’d effectively gone on strike until she came to her senses and dumped the bastard. 

Didn’t mean he wouldn’t answer if she called, but she was just as stubborn as he was and apparently had no intention of making contact before he did. That made things kind of tricky. For all he knew, she might already have dumped the guy.

“You should,” Sara said. “I think maybe she might be able to help you out. Clear your head a little.” She gave him a sideways glance. “Besides, don’t you think it’s about time you introduced her to Barry?”

“Oh, no. If I get my way, those two are never going to end up in the same room. The amount of dirt those two have on me, if they combined it, it’d turn into a fucking landslide.”

“Come on, don’t you want two of your favourite people in the same room?”

“I think those two would get on a little too well,” Len said curtly.

“Spoilsport.” Sara rinsed out her yoghurt carton and threw it into the recycling bin. “Come on, don’t be a grouch. I haven’t seen Lisa in forever.”

“You two are another great example of two people who should never be allowed in the same room.”

“If you don’t call her, I will.”

Len paused. As threats went, that one was below the belt. Lisa and Sara got along like a house on fire, and if Sara called his sister before he did, then Len would have to handle one hell of an ear-bending about why he hadn’t called first.

“Fine,” he said, “but when it all goes South, you can handle it.”

“Yay!” Sara said, and she clapped her hands like a little kid. Len, who had seen her beat up grown men twice her size and also on one occasion gouge a man’s eye out with a particularly robust toothpick, found this a little disconcerting. “You won’t regret this, I promise you!”

“Trust me,” Len said, “I already do.”

~*~

The apartment was empty when he got back, unlocking it with no small amount of apprehension. As relieved as he was to find the place unoccupied - he wouldn’t have put it past Barry to still be waiting for him on the sofa with that disapproving look on his face - he was also absurdly disappointed. Would have been nice to know that the kid cared enough to wait for him. But that was ridiculous, he reminded himself. He’d been gone all night, and Barry had a job to go to.

Strangely, the kid seemed to have tidied up before he left. Usually, he left a trail of detritus behind him on his way to work; toast crumbs, half-empty coffee mugs left on any available surface, mud tracked in on his converse, loose leaves of paper from endless forensic reports, which Len could never make head nor tail of...the apartment was unusually neat. Even his shoes were paired up in their usual heap by the front door. 

Len went for a shower as soon as he came in. As soon as he was out, towelling himself dry with a toothbrush in the other hand, he felt better. Being grimy always put him in a bad mood, and after wandering the city until the small hours and then tumbling into bed with a friend whose body temperature ran obnoxiously high, he had felt sweaty and dirty. Pulling on a clean sweater and jeans, he felt some of his bad mood evaporate with the shower water. 

After that, he padded into the kitchen in socked feet, noting the unsullied surfaces and lack of utensils which would usually be drying on the rack. It was creeping towards lunchtime so he went rooting around in the fridge and the first thing he laid his hands on was a tupperware dish filled with lasagne. The oh-so-famous, wonderful lasagne that Doctor Jeremy had made. Len curled his lip. 

...It looked good, though.

Several minutes later he found himself eating the reheated lasagne with gusto. Aggravatingly, it actually tasted amazing. He told himself he was only eating it as a peace offering to show Barry that he was okay with his annoyingly perky boyfriend, but in reality he was starving and it was a damn good lasagne.

Once he’d cleared that away and washed the tupperware, he went to the grocery store to go and pick up the stuff he needed to make some of Barry’s favourite foods. He had the idea of making a huge buffet of the things the kid liked best, which had the advantage of keeping him busy as well as winning Barry over.

He was midway through the mammoth task of making three meals at once, with cooking apparatus and miscellaneous ingredients strewn all across the kitchen, when Barry got home. All the clattering and whirring drowned out the sound of his arrival; he didn’t give his customary greeting. In fact, his entry to the kitchen gave Len a bit of a surprise. Barry stood in the doorway holding his case like a shield, eyes wide.

“You’re back,” he said.

“Miss me?” Len asked lightly.

“I…” Barry swallowed. “Where’d you go?”

“I was staying with a friend. Thought it best if we both got some air.” He turned back to the hob, giving a couple of the saucepans a stir. 

“I was worried.”

“I’m touched.”

“I mean it!”

Len turned around. Barry was gripping the case hard, his knuckles white against the handle. 

“...I’m sorry,” Len said. “I’m… not good at this.”

“All you have to do is be honest with me. That’s all I want.”

Len hesitated. “Then I am sorry. I know I was an ass last night. I don’t like that guy, but if he makes you happy then you should stay with him.”

Barry met his gaze head on. “Is that going to make  _ you  _ happy?”

“It’s not my relationship, Barry. It doesn’t matter whether I’m happy about it.”

Something in his stomach clenched when he said that. Barry was still looking at him, and the thing in his stomach started writhing. 

All of a sudden, the smoke alarm started shrieking. It blared overhead and Len swore, whirling around to tend to the food, trying to salvage the situation before the sprinklers went off. Barry leapt across the kitchen, seized a tea towel and started flapping it around the smoke alarm to disperse the fumes. By the time Len had saved the broccoli, which was kind of singed around the edges but otherwise unharmed, and they’d opened all the doors and windows to get some air in and keep the alarm going off again, the weird atmosphere seemed to have gone. Leonard breathed a silent sigh of relief.

“Oh, and by the way, I might be having a visitor some time soon. I thought it might be nice if my sister came down for a few days, so she’ll probably staying with us. Is that going to be a problem?”

Barry was starting to smile as he put his case on the table. “I didn’t know you had a sister.”

“There are a lot of things you don’t know about me, Barry.” Picking up the tea towel that Barry had been waving at the smoke alarm, Len whipped his arm with it. “One of them being that I’m a bit of a germaphobe. Get that case off my table, I don’t want corpse particles all over my food.”

“Where exactly do you think my case has been?”

“In close proximity to a lot of dead people.”

“So have I, are you gonna ask me to get off the table?”

“You can take a shower. Your case can’t. Quit back-chatting and get that thing off my damn table, Scarlet.”

“Freak,” Barry said affectionately, but he put the case on the floor instead. “So what’s she like?”

“Who, Lisa? A pain in the ass. You’d like her; you two have a lot in common.”

“Is she as grumpy as you are? Because right now I’m just kind of imagining you in a dress.”

“She’s gorgeous, and intelligent, and more than a match for both our sorry asses. If you weren’t gay I’d be telling you to stay the hell away from her. As it is, just don’t piss her off, because we’ll both end up regretting it.”

“Leonard, Leonard, Leonard. When have you ever known me to piss anybody off?”

“Frequently,” Len said, but he smirked as he said it. “So you don’t have an issue with her staying?”

“Of course not. I’m intrigued. I wanna see this gorgeous, intelligent woman who somehow happens to be related to you.” Barry paused. “Is she adopted?”

Len flicked him with the tea towel again. Barry laughed gleefully, darted across the room for another tea towel and they spent several minutes lunging at each other and occasionally landing stinging blows on every bit of exposed skin. 

“It’s almost like you want dinner to burn,” Len said breathlessly, dropping his tea-towel and going back to the cooking.

“I just love messing with you.” Barry dropped into the kitchen chair. “I have a report I need to finish - you mind if I sit here? I promise I’ll keep my dirty, death-infested case notes off the table.”

“Whatever you say, kid, just don’t get in my way.”

“I won’t,” Barry promised and he settled down with his laptop.

Silence ensued, with only the sound of pans bubbling and Barry’s fingers on the keyboard to punctuate the stillness. It occurred to Len as he stirred that he could be asking for trouble, bringing Lisa here. After all, he’d been a dick to all the guys Barry brought home; it wasn’t too much of a stretch to imagine that Barry might get a little payback by being an ass to Len’s sister. 

Almost as soon as the thought had popped into his head, he brushed it off. He didn’t think Barry was capable of being a dick to someone, and even if he was, he was certain that the thought of getting even hadn’t even occurred to Barry. Deliberately being a dick just for the sake of it didn’t sound at all like something he’d do and Len was a little ashamed of himself for even thinking about it.

The food was dealt out before too long and the two of them ate in companionable silence. Len did notice, however, that partway through the third dish Barry started picking at his food, preferring to stir it around the plate rather than eat it. That was understandable. After all, he’d made enough for three meals. 

Barry put his fork down and picked up his glass of water. “Jeremy and I had a fight.”

“I see,” Len said, sincerely hoping that he wouldn’t be expected to be sympathetic.

“I know you don’t like me talking about him,” Barry said hastily, “but I felt like you should know. It was kind of about you. After you left I wanted to go looking for you, and he was kind of rude. All this stuff about you being a grown man...and then when you didn’t come back that night I called the hospital at about 6am to make sure you hadn’t shown up there, like maybe you’d been in an accident or something. He was working, and he was kind of pissed. We had a fight. I don’t think I’ll be seeing him for a while.”

Len lifted his own glass of water to his lips to try and hide his smirk.

“That’s such a shame,” he drawled. “He seemed like such a nice guy.”

“You hated him.”

Len shrugged. “Hardly an unusual situation. I hate plenty of people. It’s probably a compliment, actually.”

“You have a strange way of looking at things.”

“You get used to it.” Len took another forkful of broccoli. “So do you have any other hot dates lined up that I should know about? Any more strange guys due on our couch in the foreseeable?”

“Nope,” Barry said. “Not one.” 

“Glad to hear it.”

They had both paused with their forks hovering in mid-air, looking right at each other. There was a weirdly charged pause, in which Len felt that they were each waiting for the other to do something but he had no idea what. He was hyper-aware of the rasp of his sweater shifting against his skin, of his own breathing, of how stupidly hot it was in the kitchen, still humid from the steam. Also of the blush creeping across Barry’s cheeks. Even as he noticed that, he saw Barry’s cheek twitch and realised that he was struggling not to smile, and that puzzled him. 

His frown caught Barry’s attention and suddenly he was serious again. Now they were locked on to each other, just watching. Barry’s face was impassive now and Len was scanning him for any slight change in expression and coming up blank, and he knew that Barry was watching him just as closely. Something fluttered in his belly.

A chunk of salmon fell off Barry’s fork and landed in the sauce, which splattered everywhere. This broke the spell; greatly flustered, Barry got up to get some kitchen roll and clean it up, whilst Len guzzled an entire glass of water all in one go and avoided making eye contact. 

Once his breathing was back under control, and he felt like he was no longer in any danger of combusting through his clothes, Len started clearing away. They’d had enough dinner. Most unusually, Barry rushed to his aid. 

“So when’s Lisa coming over?”

“I haven’t asked her yet. Probably within the next week or so.”

Barry frowned. “If you haven’t asked her yet, how do you know she’ll come? She might have stuff going on.”

Len smiled wryly. “Trust me. I know my sister. She’ll be here.”


	6. Chapter 6

As the train pulled in at the station, Len pushed off from the wall he’d been leaning against and headed to wait. The wind ruffled his jacket as the train slowed to a stop, and Lisa stepped out of the very last carriage, her hair blowing back off her face so that she looked like a model. She was wearing a pair of enormous sunglasses and was dressed all in black. He couldn’t keep the smirk off his face as she approached, clicking towards him in a pair of heels that defied all sense. 

“Lenny.”

“Sis,” he said.

She held out her arms, a huge black purse dangling in the crook of one elbow. Len launched himself at her and they hugged, her grip on him fierce. They were almost wrestling by the time he gave her a playful shove and she let him go, and she was beaming all over her face.

“You’re looking well.”

“So are you,” he said. “How’s the boyfriend?”

“Oh,” Lisa said airily, “parading around with a younger model. He decided it was  time for us both to move on. Which I did - after I was done maxing out all his credit cards, of course.” She lowered her sunglasses, looking coyly over the top of them. “Do you like them? They cost three hundred dollars. Money well spent.”

“It always is, when it’s not your money.”

“Agreed.” She stretched lazily. “So how’s this roommate of yours? Still irritating?”

Len offered her his arm. She took it, and they strolled down the platform. 

“Not so much. He still has terrible taste in men. I guess you have that in common.”

“If he’s interested in  _ any  _ men, he has bad taste. Men are all assholes.”

Len shrugged. “Yes, but Barry seems to specialise in picking the worst of the worst.”

“You haven’t shot him yet; he can’t be all bad.”

“He’s sweet. Talks too much, but there’s nothing I can do about that. He’s a good kid, probably deserves better than to be stuck living with me, but I’m not getting many complaints.”

“You like him,” Lisa observed.

“That obvious, huh?”

“You’ve actually found something nice to say about him; that in itself is astounding. I take it I’m gonna get to meet him.”

“The kid’s so excited to see you he’s practically thrown a parade. I’ll be offended on his behalf if you  _ don’t  _ meet him.”

“Aw,” Lisa said. “You two are so cute.”

“Cute is not the word I’d use.”

“Yeah, well you’re a sourpuss. I can tell you like him.”

“I can tell  _ you’re  _ going to like him, you have a lot in common. Annoying the hell out of me appears to be a shared talent of yours.”

“That’s what sisters do,” Lisa said. “I’ve been annoying the hell out of you since I popped out of the womb; this kid is just playing at it. What do Mick and Sara think of him?”

“Sara likes him. Mick hasn’t met him yet; the kid works for the CCPD and I don’t think that’d go down too well. As far as Mick’s concerned, it’s bad enough that I’ve headed for the straight and narrow. If he heard I was living with a fed I’d wake up with my house burned to the ground.”

“Nice to see you have so much faith in your friend.”

“You’ve met him,” Leonard said. “Am I doing him an injustice?”

She considered. “Probably not. Actually I’m impressed that you’ve made it this long. I was sure you’d be back to robbing banks within a week. Mick and I actually made a bet that you’d cave. So far it looks like we’re both losing.”

Len made a vague noise in the back of his throat and started flicking through conversational topics in his head, trying to think of the best way to change the subject. Unfortunately, Lisa narrowed her eyes.

“Lenny, what did you do?”

“What?” he said irritably.

Stopping at the top of the stairs, Lisa put her hand on his arm. “Did you cave? Because I have four hundred dollars and a really pretty diamond necklace staked on this bet, so if I won, you really need to tell me.”

“I didn’t cave!”

Lisa widened her eyes and looked him straight in the face. “Lenny. It’s a really, really pretty necklace.”

For all of twelve seconds Len held up under her scrutiny, but he couldn’t manage it for long. 

“Fine, so I caved,” he snapped. “But you still lose, because it was at least four months before I did.”

Rolling her eyes, Lisa said, “Then we both lose. I said a week. Mick said three. So what was it, bank robbery? Art theft? Ooh, I heard someone went over to Starling City a few weeks back and tried to break into Oliver Queen’s house, was that you?”

“You think I’m stupid enough to go to Starling City and end up poked full of arrows?”

“Or I think you’re smart enough not to get caught,” Lisa said sweetly. “You can make up your mind which one. So what was it?”

“I pinched a couple of wallets and a fancy watch,” Len snapped, “that’s it.”

“Oh, Lenny, you’re really losing your touch.”

“I’m trying to come clean. Art theft and bank robbery doesn’t sound much like the actions of an upstanding citizen. Stealing wallets may not be up to my previous standards but it’s a damn sight closer to being a normal human being.”

Realising they were still standing at the top of the stairs, Lisa took him by the arm and manhandled him back down the platform, through a doorway marked ‘staff only’ and into what appeared to be some kind of rarely-used storage closet. Folding her arms, she put her back to the door, blocking his escape route.

“Okay, since when did you ever care about being a normal human being? We’re bad guys, Lenny, you know that. You’re the one who told  _ me  _ that. You’re the one who taught me to steal my make-up from the store because Dad was never going to buy me any. You taught me to fight those girls who laughed behind my back and steal lunch money from other kids so we had enough to eat. What’s changed?”

“Why do you care?”

“Don’t give me that shit. I thought this was just a phase. Like a mid-life crisis. You’re serious about this? You want to quit crime and get a normal job in an office?”

“I’m not qualified to work in an office. I was thinking more along the lines of manual labour.”

“You hate working.”

“I hate running,” Len snapped. “Sure, it was fun once upon a time, but what happens when I’m an old man and I can’t run away from the cops fast enough? What good would all the stolen money and adrenaline rushes do me then?”

Lisa was actually looking worried. “You think you can handle it?”

“Handle what?”

“Being normal. Having a job. Not killing people.”

“I haven’t killed anyone in a while.”

“That’s exactly my point. You see it all the time. You’re doing well, maybe getting a little tempted every now and then, but everything's going okay. Then all of a sudden, someone steals your seat on the bus, or bumps into you on the street, and you snap and do something stupid. You’re good at calculated risks, Lenny, but what happens when you don’t have the patience to do the calculations?”

“Oh, ye of little faith,” Len said. “You make me sound like some kind of addict.”

“You don’t see it that way?”

He looked at her, surprised. “You mean you do?”

Lisa shrugged. “I’ve run jobs with you and Mick before. You gotta admit, that’s one hell of a rush.”

He didn’t even bother to deny it. Hadn’t he been thinking himself about how much he missed that feeling? It was a constant prickle under his skin, like some spiny creature scuttling around under there - a tiny, insignificant thing, and yet it wouldn’t quit needling him. 

But if Len believed in anything, he believed in discipline. Not the taking orders kind, but the kind you held over yourself. Mind over matter. Mick had none of it and it got him into all kinds of trouble; Len had learnt to master it after watching him, and now he had discipline in spades. He understood Lisa’s concern, but he didn’t share it.

“Do you trust me?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said without hesitating.

He couldn’t help but smile at that. She was probably the only person in the world who knew what he was capable of and still felt honestly able to say that. “Then trust me not to screw this up. If I snap and murder somebody, I’ll be sure to do it in private and dispose of the body properly afterwards.”

The corners of her mouth twitched. “And if you rob any banks, do you promise to invite me along?”

“Of course.”

“Well that’s good enough for me,” she said, stepping away from the door. Opening it, she poked her head out and looked both ways before moving out of the doorway. “Make sure you plan everything meticulously before you take me on your next heist. Orange really isn’t my colour; I’d look terrible in a prison jump-suit.”

  
Rolling his eyes, Len followed her out of the storage closet without bothering to remind her that there weren’t going to  _ be  _ any more heists. She’d get the message in the end.

~*~

When they got back to the apartment, they were immediately greeted by a smell like they’d stepped straight into a bakery. It was a homely sort of scent and they both sniffed appreciatively, though Len not without some worry. 

“Barry?”

“Hi!” Barry called. “I’m in the kitchen. Is Lisa here yet?”

“Hey,” Lisa said.

Barry popped his head out from around the kitchen door, swiftly followed by the rest of him. Christ, he was wearing that damned red and white apron again, was pink-cheeked and had a smudge of flour on his nose. At the sight of them, he grinned. 

“Wow,” he said.

“Have you been cooking?” demanded Len.

“I made cupcakes!” Barry said, and he held up a tray in his oven-gloved hands. The cakes, although thus far undecorated, actually looked edible and even fairly nice. One of two of them had sprawled out of the little paper cases and were overflowing, but they weren’t burnt. 

Len went over and picked one up for inspection. “Are these fit for human consumption?”

“I can bake!” Barry said defensively. “Quite well, actually. It’s all the other stuff I’m not so good at. Lisa, right?” He beamed at her. “I’m Barry.” He held out a hand for her to shake, realised he was still wearing the oven gloves, blushed and whipped them off.

Lisa shook his hand, a smile already spreading across her face. “Nice to meet you, Barry. You have flour on your nose.”

“I’m trying to set a trend,” he said solemnly. 

“Cute.”

They shook hands. Lisa was smiling, and it was a proper smile, not the kind of smile she used to put people off their guard before she went in for the kill. Len felt a little of the tension leave his shoulders. He dreaded to think of what would have happened if Lisa and Barry didn’t hit it off.

“You’re gorgeous,” Barry said. 

She laughed delightedly. 

“I mean - I didn’t - I was kind of expecting you to be...grumpy.”

Elbowing Len playfully, she said, “I got all the brains and the personality, there was nothing left over for Lenny. Can I take a look at those cupcakes?”

“Sure!” Barry said, and held open the kitchen doorway for her.

As she vanished over the threshold, he leaned closer to Len and whispered, “She’s like, really gorgeous.”

“Hands off,” Len said.

“I’m gay!”

“And I don’t care. Gay, straight, makes no odds to me; Lisa’s off-limits. Mick learnt that the hard way.”

He didn’t mention that it was Lisa who’d taught Mick she was off-limits and not him. The girl had one hell of a right hook.

“Thmmf umph delushuf,” Lisa said, emerging from the kitchen with her cheeks bulging. Crumbs sprayed from her mouth; she had half a cupcake in one manicured hand but the other half was already crammed into her mouth, giving her a distinctly hamster-like look.

“What was that?” Len said disdainfully.

She swallowed. The cake moved in a lump down her throat like a mouse down the gullet of a boa constrictor. “I said ‘these are delicious’. You might have competition, Lenny. You sure can cook but your baking leaves a lot to be desired.”

Len curled his lip but decided not to dignify that with a response. Barry was looking eagerly between the two of them with the air of someone watching a favourite TV show; he was going to get whiplash if he didn’t quit it.

“I need to make a start on dinner,” said Len. “Can you two behave yourselves for say, half an hour or so?”

“Always, Lenny,” Lisa said, making her eyes extremely wide.

Len did not trust her when she did that but he figured they couldn’t do too much harm sat on the sofa for a while so he ambled off to the kitchen to clear Barry’s baking apparatus away and make a start on dinner.

It took him a little longer than he thought and he’d been preparing dinner for almost three quarters of an hour before it occurred to him to check on them. They were both suspiciously quiet and he was a little concerned as he stepped into the living room.

He needn’t have been. The two of them were sat on the sofa like old friends, thoroughly engrossed in conversation. As he entered, they both looked up, and Lisa immediately adopted her most innocent expression, which inevitably meant she’d done something she shouldn’t have. Barry tried to mimic it, but there was something wrong with his lips; they kept twitching. 

The two of them were deliberately not looking at each other, and Len knew they were up to something, so he folded his arms, put on his most unimpressed expression and waited.

Barry caved first. He gave a little snort, and then started howling with laughter. Lisa giggled and then utterly lost control and joined in, and the two of them lay on the couch absolutely convulsing with mirth whilst Len looked at them with one eyebrow raised.

“What did you do?”

“Nothing,” Lisa gasped. “Nothing, I swear.”

“A likely story. Barry?”

Barry was still giggling, but he managed to pull himself together slightly. “We’ve just - oh God - we’ve just been sharing stories, that’s all.”

“About?”

“You,” Lisa said, and she choked. “I have plenty of embarrassing stories up my sleeve, Lenny, don’t you worry about that.”

“And I have plenty more about you,” he threatened. 

“Trust me, the amount of dirt Barry and I have on you, we could probably bury you in it,” Lisa said with no small amount of glee.

“I hate you both.”

“You don’t,” she said, lounging back on the sofa. “When’s dinner?”

Dinner itself was a great source of amusement to Len, as Barry and Lisa chatted through the whole thing apparently having forgotten he was there. He didn’t really mind; he had been more than a little concerned that they mightn’t get on and he would have dealt with way worse than this as long as they weren’t at each other’s throats. In fact, in a weird way he kind of enjoyed just sitting back and listening to them talk, seeing two of the people he cared about spending time together.

“I need to do the washing up,” he said, stirring in his seat.

“Leave it,” Barry said dismissively. “I’ll do it in the morning.”

“Really?”

“Sure. Why waste tonight?”

“Okay,” Len said. “What do you wanna do?”

“I wanna play cards,” Lisa said.

“I’m not sure that’s such a good idea,” Len cautioned. “Barry here’s a little card sharp.”

Barry shrugged modestly. “I know a thing or two.”

“Oh, well now we have to play. I’m intrigued.” She smirked at him. “I bet I can take you.”

“I bet you can,” Barry said.

Len sincerely doubted it. Lisa wasn’t bad at cards herself but Len taught her everything she knew and he’d proven on numerous occasions that he couldn’t take Barry either.

At the end of the third round Lisa threw down her cards in mock disgust. She’d been cheating disgustingly for the past ten minutes and Barry had still beaten her.  
  
“Don't you know it's good manners to let the guest win the game?"   
  
"A false victory is no victory at all," Barry said solemnly. He spread out his cards and fanned himself with them. "Another game?"    
  
"Actually I think I'm gonna turn in, I'm pretty tired. It was a long trip."    
  
"Alright," Len said. "Just give me a few minutes to change the sheets, you can sleep in my bed and I'll sleep on the couch."    
  
"Oh no, you can take my bed," Barry said, "I'll sleep on the couch."    
  
"She's _ my  _ sister Barry, I'm not going to turf you out of your bed so she has a place to sleep."   
  
"Yeah but I know how you get if you don't get enough sleep. Anyway,” he said cheekily, “it’s age before beauty."    
  
"For that you _ can _ sleep on the couch," Len told him, and he hit him with a cushion.   
  
"Why don't we just share my bed and then nobody has to sleep on the couch?"    
  
"Actually," Lisa interrupted, "nobody has to give up their bed because I won't be staying here tonight. I've arranged to stay with an old friend; I haven't seen her in a while."    
  
"Who?" Len demanded.  
  
"Sara offered me a bed for the night. We're going to have a slumber party. We'll paint each other's nails and talk about boys - just like old times."   
  
Len frowned. Not that he wasn't pleased that Sara and Lisa were friends - it was just that he'd sort of forgotten about it. He'd been expecting Lisa to stay with them.   
  
"At least let me walk you back."  
  
"Of course," she said. "I'll get my coat."

~*~

  
"So what do you think of Barry?" he asked as they headed for Sara's house.  
  
"He's sweet,” Lisa said. “What do _you_ think of him?"  
  
"What’s that supposed to mean?"  
  
"Oh, come on, Lenny, you don't get like this with anyone. I've never seen you this relaxed. You really care about him."  
  
Len shrugged. "I guess he's family. I don't include new people often, but somehow Barry made the list.”

They were quiet for a while. He could practically hear Lisa’s brain ticking over and he couldn’t say he was surprised. Len’s definition of family was a strict one and it encompassed Lisa, Mick, Sara and that was it. For it to stretch to include someone else after all this time was more than unusual; it was almost unheard of.

“There’s something else, isn’t there?” Lisa asked. “I can tell. It’s more than that with him. You act different around him.”

“Honestly, Lise, I don’t know. Things are...different between Barry and me. I don’t really get it myself. At the moment I’m just trying to roll with it.”

Lisa pursed her lips but made no further comment. They walked arm in arm for a while, and before he knew it they’d reached Sara’s front doorstep. 

“You two behave yourselves,” he said. “If I hear of any naked pillow fights going on, I’m calling the cops and you’re grounded.”   
Lisa pouted. “You’re no fun.”

“You’re off limits,” he reminded her, ringing the intercom. “Sara knows that, but should she need reminding, I’ll be happy to come teach her a lesson.”

She rolled her eyes at him. “Lighten up, Lenny. I’ll see you in the morning. I need to go shopping, I still have one of Mitchell’s credit cards that might have a few hundred dollars left on it.”

“I look forward to it.”

Sara opened the door and launched herself at Lisa. There was some squealing and a lot of hugging, and Sara took the time to punch Leonard on the arm for no reason whatsoever before she hauled Lisa over the threshold and dragged her upstairs. They vanished, and Len could hear them chattering excitedly all the way up the stairs about god knows what. You’d have thought they hadn’t communicated in years from the way they were carrying on, when Len knew for a fact that Sara texted Lisa more than he did.

As he headed back to the apartment, Len reflected on what he’d just said to Lisa and just how true it was. He’d been living with Barry for less than six months and already he trusted him almost as much as he trusted Sara and a little more than he trusted Mick. His partner could be volatile, so that was perhaps understandable. Barry might wake up him at the ass crack of dawn by knocking over everything in the kitchen, or bring in stray assholes off the street and make out with them on the couch, but Len didn’t have to worry about him burning down the apartment or leaving dead bodies in the bathtub. 

And yet he’d known Mick for years and the guy had seen him with his shirt off only a handful of times, most of them being when they were stitching each other up after a fight. What did it say that Barry had not only seen him with his shirt off, but touched him as well?

Len clenched his jaw. It was time to sort this shit out. If Lisa couldn’t shed some light on what the hell was going on between him and Barry, then he was going straight round to Sara’s house and he was going to threaten her until she told him what she knew.

He might be there for a while, since she was unlikely to be impressed by his threats, but goddamn if he wasn’t going to try. It was about time this got sorted out once and for all.

~*~

He took Lisa for coffee in Jitters a couple of days later, while they waited for her train, and the place was certainly living up to its name as far was Leonard was concerned; he couldn’t sit still. He was about to spill his guts to his sister and while she was one of the few people he could be honest with, he didn’t much fancy the whole coffee shop listening in. Especially not when it was a favourite haunt of so many of Barry’s chirpy little pals; Iris worked there, for God’s sake, and the idea of her overhearing his heart to heart and possibly passing it on made him feel incredibly uncomfortable.

“So what’s this all about, Lenny?” Lisa asked, adding a fourth packet of sugar to her coffee. “You said it was about Barry?”

Len gave one last cursory sweep of the cafe before he said, “Look, I don’t know what’s happening. I really don’t. And I really need some advice because I think I’m going to go crazy.”

“Okay,” Lisa said, narrowing her eyes. “Spill.

It was easier with Lisa than it had been with Sara. They’d always understood each other, on some fundamental level. Could communicate with a look, or a tiny gesture. Perhaps that was why he felt as though it took half as many words to explain the situation and yet he was able to get his meaning across far more easily. Lisa watched him all throughout his explanation, letting her coffee grow cold, while Len told her everything he told Sara and a good deal he hadn’t, some of that just with his facial expressions. 

Once he was done he slumped back in his seat, weirdly drained. His head was full of little moments. Barry smiling, shouting, snapping, hurt and confused, throwing his head back and laughing, all those weird pauses stretched between them when Len felt like a stranger in his own body and he had no idea how to move, what to say, how to think. It made his head hurt trying to make sense of it all.

“I don’t want to hurt the kid,” Len said. “I don’t even know what it is, but every guy he brings home, I want to shoot. They aren’t all assholes, I knew that Jeremy was a decent enough guy, but I couldn’t stand the sight of him anyway. I’m starting wonder if the kid’s right, and I’m really that bitter that I can’t stand to see other people happy in a relationship because I’m not.”

Lisa leaned back in her chair, unimpressed. “You’re an idiot,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“You’re an idiot,” she repeated. “Isn’t it obvious?”

“Enlighten me.”

“Oh come on, Lenny, it’s not hard to figure out. You’re in love with Barry.”

Len stared at her.

“I was ninety percent sure even before you started telling me about the  _ butterflies in your stomach _ , and the way you  _ can’t stop thinking of him  _ even when he’s not around - ”

“I never said that - ”

“ - and the  _ irrational jealousy _ you get whenever he brings a guy home,” Lisa continued, talking over him.

“You think I’m  _ jealous _ ?”

“How else would you describe it? Anger, irritation, inexplicable loathing for anyone Barry brings home - oh, but only if it’s a guy around his age who he’s sexually or romantically interested in. Happens all the time, clearly.”

“I’m not in love with him,” Len protested. “He’s my roommate. He’s still in his twenties. He’s - he’s  _ male _ , for God’s sake, I’m  _ straight _ .”

Lisa sipped her coffee. “Sure?”

“Yes,” Leonard said irritably.

Then, he had a moment of doubt. Just a little flicker, but one that suddenly sparked into a flame. Because he did get weird feelings in his chest sometimes when Barry smiled, something he’d always assumed must be heartburn, and he did feel that weird contented glow when Barry cuddled up next to him on the sofa when he would normally have felt only irritation - he wasn’t a touchy feely guy, but when had Barry become the exception? And most condemning of all - he suddenly remembered, with a rush of heat to his cheeks, that time when he’d fallen asleep on the kitchen table and then he’d taken his shirt off and Barry had given him that damn massage. 

At the time it had been too painful to be pleasant, all the knots and tension in his shoulders making Barry’s probing difficult to bear. But if he thought about it now, Barry’s hands moving across his skin, sliding from his shoulders, right down, maybe slipping from his back and to the front of him instead, down his stomach...down further...Barry’s sharp little chin resting on his shoulder with his cheek pressed against Len’s…

He realised he’d been staring blankly into space for about a minute. Lisa raised her eyebrows at him.

“No,” he said sullenly.

“That’s what I thought,” she murmured. 

“Okay, so maybe I have feelings for him. I’ve never had any feelings for a guy before, how was I supposed to figure it out?”

“Feelings for a guy, feelings for a girl, I don’t see how it makes any difference,” Lisa said airily. “You were just being dense, as usual. And you’re not subtle, Lenny, the way you look at him - I thought at first maybe I was imagining it but there’s no way I’d imagine it as often as that. You never take your eyes off him. He walks into a room, and that’s it - you’re lost for anyone else.”

“You make me sound like a love-struck teenager,” Len said.

She smirked at him.

“Shut your mouth.”

“I’m saying nothing.”

“Well start saying something, because I need your advice. What do I do now?”

“You tell him, of course.”

“I’m not going to tell him, what’s wrong with you?” Len demanded.

“Why not? He likes you.”

“Just because he’s gay does not mean he likes me.”

“Trust me,” said Lisa, “he likes you. The kid thinks you hung the moon. He looks at you like the sun shines out of your ass.”

“You mean it doesn’t?”

“Ha, ha. I mean it, Lenny. Don’t you dare just sit on this and make yourself miserable. I know you. Given half a chance you’ll just try and pretend you don’t know, act like you aren’t in love with him.” She leaned across the table. “Don’t. You.  _ Dare. _ ”

“Why? What difference does it make to you?”

“Because I care about you. And I may not know him well, but I care about Barry, too. So don’t you dare mess this up.”

~*~

In general Len was a bit of a loner. He’d learnt a long time ago that there was only one person you could really rely on, and that was yourself. Even if you let yourself down, there was nobody else to blame. So he didn’t really go in for the whole friend thing, considered Mick to be more of an associate than anything else. But the fact of the matter was that he needed someone to talk to, and Mick was the only person he had left who didn’t know Barry personally and therefore wouldn’t be biased. 

He trawled half of the bars in Central City before he eventually found Mick in one of them. (It would have taken even longer if he didn’t have a comprehensive list of establishments that either he, Mick, or both of them were barred from.) Mick was sat alone drinking a beer. Len walked in, bought two beers, and then went to sit by Mick at the bar, pushing one of the drinks at him. Wordlessly, Mick took it.

Neither of them spoke. Mick finished his first beer and started drinking the second, while Len sipped a little of his and fervently wished he’d bought something else. He wasn’t in a beer kind of mood, but he figured it might get him into Mick’s good books.

Mick was halfway through the second beer by the time he spoke. “You’ve been avoiding me, Snart.”

Len didn’t bother denying it. It would have been insulting to even try; he  _ had  _ been avoiding Mick, and pretty blatantly. He took another sip of his beer.

“I’m in love,” he said blandly.

A huge grin spread across Mick’s face. He put his beer down with a thunk, condensation smearing across the bar-top.

“Love, huh?”

“Yep,” said Len.

“Since when did you go in for any of that crap?” Mick demanded, but he was still grinning all over his face. “So? Who’s the lucky lady?”

“It’s a guy,” Len said baldly. “My roommate.”

There was a loaded pause. Len took another sip of his beer, carefully watching Mick out of the corner of his eye. He wasn’t entirely sure what response to expect; he and Mick had never really broached this kind of topic before. It was unchartered territory, kind of like quicksand. His heart beat a little unevenly.

Eventually, Mick grunted. “Never knew you played for the other team.”

“Me neither,” Len said. “I think maybe I play for both.”

“Hmm,” Mick said. 

He finished his beer. Len downed his, and bought them both another one. He was kind of hoping that if things went south, he could just get Mick pass-out drunk and wipe the slate clean, bail on this as a bad job.

“Your roommate,” Mick said. “I’ve never met him.”

“Didn’t think you’d like him,” said Len. “He’s a fed. Works for the CCPD. He’s in forensics.”

“A cop?” Mick whistled. “You sure can pick ‘em, Snart.”

“I’ve heard that before.” 

“You better not get all domestic on me,” Mick warned. “I don’t do couples. You start waxing poetic about the colour of his eyes and I’m gonna kick your ass.”

“Well now you mention it, his eyes  _ are  _ incredibly dreamy,” Len deadpanned.

“Fuck off. Go stare into his eyes and tell him how much you love him, or whatever the hell it is you do.”

“Chance would be a fine thing. He doesn’t know. I haven’t told him.”

Mick raised an eyebrow. “Why?”

Len shrugged.

“He play for both teams too?” Mick asked suspiciously.

“Just the one.”

“Which one?”

“Mine.”

Mick leaned back on his stool as if to say ‘well then’.

“It’s not that simple, Mick,” Len said irritably. “Just because he likes guys doesn’t mean he’s going to like me.”

“Nope,” agreed Mick. “In fact, if he has any sense, he won’t. You’re an asshole.”

Len gave him the finger. 

“Thing is, Snart,” said Mick, “you won’t know if you don’t tell him.”

“And what if he rejects me? I’m not exactly a catch. I’ve got no job, no family, no friends worth a damn - ”

“Fuck you.”

“ - I’m way older than him, I scare old ladies and as you kindly pointed out, I’m kind of an asshole. I can’t think of any good reason why he wouldn’t turn me down and then what? Things get awkward between us, he doesn’t wanna be around me, he moves out or I move out and then I’ve lost him altogether and I’m homeless into the bargain.”

“Well the whining is a turn-off, I can tell you that much.”

Len’s middle finger was getting some serious exercise tonight. Soon he was going to develop carpal tunnel from flipping Mick off so often.

“Listen,” Mick said, “stuff like this, you can’t let it get away from you. You wanna be sat at this bar in ten years wondering what would have happened if you grew a pair and told this kid how you feel about him? You and me, we don’t do that soppy crap. If you like him enough to tell me about it, it’s serious. So go and tell him, asshole. Worst case scenario, he rejects you and kicks you out. I don’t care; means I get my partner back. You can move back in with me, get back to a life of crime. If not, you could end up with the love of your life. It’s not exactly a difficult decision, Snart.”

Weirdly, Mick was giving him this intense look. In fact, he almost looked angry, like they were back in juvie and Len had just messed up and picked a fight with someone bigger than him and Mick was tearing him a new one for being an idiot. It brought back all sorts of memories of getting his ass kicked, having Mick stitch him back up again and then give him another ass-kicking just to make sure he got the message. It had been a long time since Mick had needed to handle him like that. In fact, for the past few years it had been Len doing the handling.

“Since when did you start giving me advice?”

“Since when did you start needing it?” Mick retorted. “You never used to need anyone to hold your hand. Get your ass into gear and fix it, before it’s too late. Second chances, they don’t come too easy.”

Len finished his beer. It was becoming increasingly clear what he had to do; everyone was telling him the same thing, there was no getting away from it. He was going to have to get his shit together and talk to Barry.

But not tonight. He needed time to think, to plan it like he might a heist. To figure out everything that might go wrong, and how best to proceed to avoid it. These things couldn’t be rushed, not unless you wanted to mess it up. Besides, he’d drunk those beers rather too quickly and he didn’t want to do this drunk, as easy as it might be. Barry deserved better than that. For once in his damn life, Len was going to be honest with someone.

“Thanks,” he said curtly.

Mick raised his glass. “Any time. Oh, and Snart?”

“What?”

“Let him know that if he screws you up, I’ll kick his ass.”

Len smirked. “Thanks, Mick.”

They went back to their drinks and Len basked in that quiet glow that was a mixture of relief, and gratitude that after all this time he still had Mick behind him to watch his back.

~*~

“Barry, we need to talk.”

They were watching some kind of forensic science documentary, Barry on the couch, Len sprawled in the armchair, attempting nonchalance. Barry was happily engrossed in the TV, and aside from cheerfully correcting the narrator every now and then, he was quiet. Len, on the other hand, was feeling distinctly antsy. In an attempt to convince himself that everyone was talking bullshit and he had no interest in Barry at all, he’d been trying to put some distance between them; whereas usually they’d both be on the couch, for the past few days he’d been taking the chair instead. Barry didn’t seem to have noticed, but Len was finding that the urge to sit next to him on the couch was getting increasingly stronger.

He’d been on his phone, trying to distract himself, but he kept being bombarded with messages from Lisa and Sara. They’d added him to some kind of group chat, refused to let him leave it and bombarded him with messages that mostly consisted of ‘TELL HIM’ and a lot of exclamation marks. They were making him twitchy, so he’d turned his phone off - which then meant that he had nothing to keep him from glancing at Barry every minute or so. He was trying to watch the documentary, but the science of it was going right over his head. He knew how to kill a man, but he didn’t really give a shit about figuring out how someone  _ else  _ had killed a man. 

Reaching for the remote, Barry muted the TV. “Sure,” he said, turning to face Len. “What’s up?”

For a moment Len felt something distinctly like panic clawing at his chest. He had a sudden urge to say ‘nothing’ and shove it all back down again - but then he thought of the supreme ass-kicking he’d get from Sara, Mick and his sister, and, more importantly, he thought of Barry and Hartley Rathaway lying entwined together on that same couch, and the flare of temper he felt at that recollection made him steel himself. 

Getting up, he crossed the room in a few short strides and sat down next to Barry. Up close, he could see things he’d never cared to notice before - or actively avoided noticing. His dark, long lashes. The gentle slope of his nose. His eyes were a pretty colour - kind of grey-green, with flecks of light dancing in them. On an impulse, Len took Barry’s hands and held them.

That took Barry by surprise, but he didn’t pull his hands away. Len took that as a good sign and decided to continue.

“I’m not good at the mushy stuff,” he said, “so I’ll spare you the theatrics. I feel like I owe you an explanation for why I’ve been a complete asshole to all the guys you’ve brought home.”

Barry said nothing, but his hands were a little sweaty. Or maybe it was Len’s. He wasn’t exactly keeping cool himself. Breathing in, he steadied himself.

“I like you,” he said, and then decided it sounded stupid, like he was confessing to a schoolboy crush just like Lisa said. “I...have feelings for you. And I never recognised them until now.”

Barry’s eyes widened. “Leonard…”

“I don’t expect anything to change,” Len interrupted. “I don’t want to make things uncomfortable for you. I’m happy for things to carry on the way they are, just you and me living here; I don’t want you to feel obligated to change anything. I know I’m too old for you, and I’m… not exactly boyfriend material.” He forced a sardonic smile. “But I just wanna ask you to cut me a little slack the next time I chase some asshole away from you, because as you so astutely pointed out, I’m jealous. I’ll try to tone it down a little next time.”

Barry looked thunderstruck. “You...you have feelings for me?”

“You mean it’s not obvious? Because according to everyone else I know, I’ve been broadcasting loud and clear.” There was a rapidly growing knot in his stomach. Feeling it clench, he let go of Barry’s hands. “So now you know my little secret, I guess it’s up to you whether you feel you can stand to continue living with me, or whether my  _ feelings  _ are going to make it impossible to - ”

“Wait, wait. Leonard, you do know I’ve had a crush on you since the day we moved in, right?”

Now it was Len’s turn to be gobsmacked. “ _ What? _ ”

A smile was creeping across Barry’s face. He reached out and tentatively took Len’s hands in his own. “I,” he said, “have  _ the _ biggest crush on you.”

Len felt an incredibly embarrassing grin start threatening to emerge; he managed to turn it into a smirk, turning his face away a little so that Barry didn’t see it. Judging by Barry’s own huge grin, it was a futile effort.

“You mean  _ you  _ didn’t notice? I’ve been flirting with you this whole time, you know that.”

“You were flirting with me?”

“Leonard. I gave you a massage.”

Len opened and closed his mouth several times. “I thought you were being…”

“What?”

“...Friendly.”

“I asked you to take your shirt off!”

Well. Put like that it did seem rather obvious. It probably would have been if Barry Allen weren’t the type of person to go doling out random massages to anyone who might need one, and acting like everyone he ever encountered was the most interesting person he’d ever met. 

Still, even Len could tell that there was something different about the way Barry was looking at him right now. One might even call it adoration. His fervent grip on Len’s hands spoke for itself. 

Barry bit his lip, then smiled and said shyly, “Can I - can I kiss you?”

Len pretended to consider. “I might allow it.”

“Goofball,” Barry said delightedly, and he leaned in.

It had been a long time since Len had kissed anyone and weirdly, he found himself feeling kind of nervous about it. In the past, most of his kisses had felt more like some form of assault. It was weird having Barry’s face so close to his, close enough to feel his breath dancing across Len’s cheek, to see that his lips were a little bit chapped and his eyes had green in them. Then his eyes started to blur into one, and Len blinked hard to try and refocus.

“You’re, uh. You’re kind of supposed to close your eyes for this part,” Barry said softly.

Len leaned back a little and scoffed. “I have kissed people before, Barry.”

“Yeah, but not recently. You might have forgotten how to do it.”

“I haven’t,” Len said.

Barry raised his eyebrows. “Prove it.”

In response, Len let go of Barry’s hands, which fell into his lap, and grabbed his face instead. The kid went quiet then, but his eyes lit up and Len could see him fighting a smile. He wanted to kiss the corners of Barry’s mouth and feel that smile twitching there, but he also wanted their first kiss to be something a little more impressive than that. If Barry wasn’t breathless and weak at the knees by the time it was over, then Len wasn’t doing it right. 

One thing he did know - had become painfully aware of, over the past few days - was the potency of anticipation. Besides which, he’d been playing this moment over and over in his mind ever since his conversation with Lisa in Jitters; he kind of wanted to savour the moment.

Barry, of course, could be counted upon for anything apart from sitting still. He bore about thirty seconds of silence, while Len tried to commit everything about this moment to memory, before he cracked.

“You sure you haven’t forgotten?”

“The thrill is in the chase,” Len told him, and he leaned in to press his forehead to Barry’s. 

Barry shivered and closed his eyes, and Len felt a ripple of satisfaction.  _ Got him. _

“Well to be honest, I’ve been chasing you for the past five months and this is the most thrilling things have gotten so far.”

Len brushed Barry’s bottom lip with the pad of his thumb, feeling heat flood through him. “Guess I’ve got a lot to make up for then,” he said, and he leaned in and brushed his mouth against Barry’s.

It was supposed to be a tease, but as soon as their lips met Len lost all of his self control and Barry apparently decided he wasn’t going to let go. Grabbing Len’s forearms, he anchored him in place and the kiss deepened, and one of Len’s hands made its way into Barry’s hair. 

In spite of his bravado, Len had been kind of wary about his first time kissing a man, but it wasn’t really all that different to kissing a woman. Barry’s lips were soft, and his hair silky underneath Len’s fingers. He was eager, though, in a way he wasn’t used to. Ordinarily, kissing was a prelude to sex, more of a courtesy anything else. But Barry didn’t kiss like he wanted to get it out of the way and move on to something more; he kissed for the pure pleasure of it. 

When they finally parted, they were both breathless. Barry’s lips were swollen and he was beaming like an idiot. Len cuffed him lightly before kissing him again, just because he could. 

“Was it worth the wait?” he asked.

Barry pretended to consider, although he couldn’t wipe the grin off his face. “Hmm. You know, I’m actually not sure. We might have to do it again, just to make sure.”

“Well,” said Len. “If you insist.”

  
~*~

“Come on, Iris, give me a break.”

Barry and Iris were sat in Jitters, and he was appealing to her better nature. It was a cool day they were both wrapped up, Iris looking very cute in a red sweater and pointy boots, but with a distinctly unimpressed look on her face. She had her arms folded and was resolutely ignoring the coffee Barry had bought her, which she had only just recognised as a bribe. Barry was waiting for her to cave and trying to negotiate at the same time, with limited success. He was pretty sure she was about to give up with regards to the coffee, but the other thing...not so much.

“I just don’t get it,” she said. “He’s so grumpy. And he’s way older than you,  _ and  _ he’s kind of a jerk. Scratch that - he’s a  _ total  _ jerk.”

“He is not,” said Barry. “He just puts on a good front. Underneath all that macho asshole stuff, he’s a great guy. You’d love him if you got to know him.”

“I’m sorry, exactly how many times did you turn up on our couch complaining that he’d been a dick to one of your new boyfriends?”

“He was jealous!” Barry protested. “Anyway, I wasn’t exactly Mr. Nice Guy when he brought Sara round for the first time; I thought she was his girlfriend. I hardly spoke to her.”

“There’s a difference between not speaking to someone and bodily removing any competition from your apartment - ”

“Hey, he only threatened to do that, it never actually happened - ”

“Barry!” Iris said. “Listen to yourself. How can you defend him? You know I don’t like him, and my dad likes him even less. You should hear the things people say about him - and those  _ thugs  _ he hangs out with! That Mick Rory gives me nightmares.”

“Mick’s a big teddy bear,” said Barry, who would never admit to being more than a little intimidated by Mick himself. He still hadn’t quite forgotten their first meeting, when Mick had cordially shaken his hand, encouraged Barry to get roaring drunk with him and then taken him off to one side and threatened to set fire to everything he held dear if he ever upset Leonard. It had been a mildly traumatising experience, but he didn’t want to give Iris any more ammunition to add to her anti-Leonard hate campaign.

“He’s a beast,” Iris said flatly.

“What about Sara? She’s great. You like Sara.”

Iris scowled. She  _ did  _ like Sara, who was probably the most civilised of Leonard’s friends, at least on the outside. Barry knew that Sara could probably disembowel a man with a bendy straw, but she looked sweet and unassuming, whereas Lisa had a dangerous look about her and Mick was quite frankly frightening. 

Still frowning, Iris picked up her coffee and took a sip, and Barry sensed victory in his grasp.

“I’m just asking you to come round for dinner,” he said pleadingly. “It means a lot to me. I really want you guys to get along. And Len really is a terrific cook.”

“If he’s cooking then I’m definitely not coming. He’d probably spit in it.”

“He would never do that!” Barry said, horrified. 

“You sure?”

“Yes!” Barry said, and made a mental note to make sure he didn’t. Not that he thought Leonard would stoop that low, but he and Iris didn’t exactly see eye to eye. He didn’t want Len’s temper to get the better of him.

“You’d owe me big-time,” Iris said, pointing accusingly at him.

“Is that a yes?” 

“Hypothetically!” Iris said, but he already knew he had her. Beaming, Barry leaned back in his seat.

“You’re the best.”

“I haven’t said yes yet!”

“You will.”

Iris flipped him off, but Barry was already daydreaming about having dinner with two of his favourite people and trying to figure out how to make it less awkward. His preliminary plan involved wine, but only a moderate amount. Enough to reduce the tension but not enough to make them honest. He didn’t fancy the idea of them drunkenly yelling at each other while he cringed between them. Maybe he would invite a few others round, make it a party. Three was a crowd after all. Sara might be a good choice; she’d pacify Leonard and put Iris at ease…. 

He was already well into drawing up menu options when Iris said, “Just you tell him to tone down the attitude, or else the deal’s off.”

“What attitude?” said Barry, bewildered.

“That voice of his puts me on edge. He’s so sarcastic, I don’t think he’d know sincerity if it fell over him.”

“He always sounds like that, it’s not intentional.”

“Oh, so he’s  _ always  _ an asshole!” Iris said with mock amazement. “Well that makes me feel so much better.”

Barry rolled his eyes at her. “It’s been four months, Iris. You’re gonna have to come to terms with it eventually. We’re not breaking up, neither of us are moving out, and I’m happy. Yes, he’s older, yes, he’s grumpy, yes, he can be kind of a dick - but I care about him. I love him. You’re gonna have to accept it.”

“Actually, my current strategy is choosing to pretend you’re still dating that nice doctor who your psychotic new boyfriend scared off a few months back.”

“And how’s that working out for you?”

“Great,” Iris said brightly. “It’s a scenario that doesn’t give me nightmares, so that’s always nice.”

“Mind if I interrupt?”

Iris pursed her lips. A shadow had fallen over their table; Len was standing over them, with only eyes for Barry. He gave Iris a glance and a curt nod, which she didn’t return, and then went back to watching Barry with his usual single-minded intensity. There was no love lost between those two, Barry thought wistfully - but he was working on it.

“Ready to go?” Len asked.

“We’re going out tonight,” Barry explained. “I’m taking a day or two off work soon to go check something out in Starling City, so Len and I are going to the movies and then we’re going to go to Olive Garden to eat our weight in breadsticks while he acts like he isn’t going to miss me.”

He looked at Len, grinning. Rolling his eyes, Len dug him gently in the ribs but didn’t object to this description of the evening. 

“Sounds great,” Iris said sarcastically. “I bet you’ll have a whale of a time.”

“We sure will,” Len said, holding out his hand. “Barry?”

Shrugging on his coat, Barry took the proffered hand with a tingle of excitement. Four months in and he still hadn’t gotten used to that. The novelty of being able to touch Len, to flirt with him without wondering if he was getting too carried away, without the twinge of regret whenever he remembered that Len wasn’t his… being able to hold his hand and kiss him and play-fight with him and cuddle up to him on the sofa, it hadn’t yet worn off and he didn’t think it ever would. Warm all over, he beamed at Iris.

“I’ll see you later, all right? Think about that dinner party. I’ll call you.”

Iris waved him away, miming nausea at the way he was hanging off Leonard’s arm. Barry knew he was kind of disgusting, that he was trying to make them into the worst kind of couple. The outward indifference Len feigned was made up for by Barry’s unhindered sappiness. He really didn’t care.

They headed for the door, Len’s hand tight around his. Just as they were about to leave, Iris called his name and Barry looked back.

“You coming to see them switch on the particle accelerator on Friday night?”

The particle accelerator. Dr. Wells’ pride and joy, the thing Cisco and Caitlin had been enthusing about for weeks, a tremendous scientific breakthrough about to begin right here in Central City, just under his nose. Barry was buzzing with excitement just at the very thought.

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” he said.  
  
He and Leonard sailed out of the doorway, Barry’s head already gravitating onto Len’s shoulder, and they went to catch a taxi.

 

The End

 

...Or is it? :P

 


End file.
